This time, I talk about another brilliant film from the
Master of Suspense - ‘Frenzy’ (1972)!
‘Frenzy’ was a late Hitchcock film, and it was a British one,
because the setting was in London and it
featured Covent Garden and the River Thames. A
reason why ‘Frenzy’ is important for Hitchcock’s filmography is because the
film served as a surrogate for an unrealized film in the 1960s, known as ‘Kaleidoscope’. By watching some of the available footages
available on the internet, one can easily feel that this unfinished project
would have been the Master of Suspense’s most ambitious work, and it would be
extremely controversial for the mainstream audience in the 1960s, as it
contained explicit nudity and a controversial theme – the film was intended to
tell the story from the psychopathic killer’s point of view. From the footages,
one would note the heightened mise-en-scene and the atmospheric use of the red color,
which would remind us of Michelangelo Antonioni’s style, especially from ‘The
Red Desert’. Hitchcock was highly impressed by Antonioni’s work, and the
heightened use of color could serve to enhance the perversity regarding the
crime from the killer. While all of these were only speculations, one should be
convinced that if ‘Kaleidoscope’ was really made, it was likely that it would
be a brilliant milestone, and would completely change the way we looked at
Hitchcock and his films. Like Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ is a window to
his unrealized project ‘Napoleon’, Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’ can thus be seen as a substitute
and it provides important clues on how Hitchcock would have approached ‘Kaleidoscope’
if he really had the chance.
Something horrendous has happened on the River Thames. A
naked female corpse, with a neck tie tightened on her neck, was discovered when
the corpse was washed ashore. Blaney, the protagonist, was believed to be the
main suspect due to circumstantial evidence. Yet, the Master of Suspense has
made no attempt to hide the fact that this was not the case – the real killer,
known as the necktie killer, was actually the fruit merchant Rusk, Blaney’s
friend. Rusk has already murdered Blaney’s ex-wife when a forced advance on her
has failed, leading to her rape and murder by strangulation. Then, the next
victim was Babs, Blaney’s girl friend, and she perished tragically in one of
the most iconic sequences of the film, which took place in an apartment in the Covent Garden . While Blaney defended his innocence, all
the fabricated evidence seemed to point towards him as the culprit and he was
jailed. Soon, Oxford ,
the police inspector responsible for the case, started to have intuitions that
Blaney might not be the killer after all. Could Blaney escape, and would Rusk
be eventually captured?
‘Frenzy’, while preserving the suspenseful mood of many other
Hitchcock films, was far darker in tone than the other major Hitchcock work.
The film dealt with the psychology of a perverse rapist and murderer, and the
viewpoint of the film was set in an objective manner so that the audience would
not be over-identified with the bad guy. One could easily sense the risk these
issue could have on the reception on the film, because in Hitchcock’s original
treatment of the unrealized ‘Kaleidoscope’, the film would present a subjective
viewpoint for that of the charismatic killer, and many audience in the 1960s
were still not open-minded enough to explore the story in such a forced
perspective, as least in a cinematic way. Indeed, another British filmmaker,
Michael Powell, has made a film called ‘Peeping Tom’ in the early 1960s, was
exactly viewed from the perverse killer’s point-of-view, as he always used a
camera to capture the final facial expressions of his victims because he killed
them. While this film eventually became a cult classic, it was unacceptable by
many of the audience and the receptions were very bad initially. When Hitchcock
might have abandoned the more daring approach in ‘Frenzy’, the initial receptions
regarding the film were polarized. While some positive reviewers were happy to
see that the Master of Suspense was coming back in full force, others saw the
film as dark and cold, and the violence scenes were mean and rather perverse.
Like ‘Rope’, and many of his other films, Hitchcock did not
shape ‘Frenzy’ as a ‘whodunit’ film. The killer, Rusk, was revealed very early,
and for his portrayal, Hitchcock did not make him mysterious or his identity as
a secret in anyway. What the Master of Suspense were driving at was to let his
audience to experience the perverse psychology of the necktie killer and how he
used his deceptive antics to interact with his surroundings, charming and
luring the female victims into his net. Blaney and Rusk could be considered as
doubles – a motif often used in many crime or suspense films. The dramatic
weights have put on the two characters were unbiased, therefore one could see
he was placing similar importance on both characters. While Hitchcock has not
risked to alienate the audience by placing a subjective perspective on the
killer, just like in ‘Peeping Tom’, the viewpoint was objective when we saw
Rusk matching wits with the police and the other characters. Indeed, Blaney has
gone as far to attempt to destroy his double, when he was pretty certain Rusk
was behind all these murders, though he was tricked by Rusk and could only
succeed in a later attempt.
Black humor, a strategy Hitchcock often employed alongside
with his signature suspense, was very effective for the tone of ‘Frenzy’. Rusk
was responsible for much of this black humor, and if this ‘comic relief’ was
not administered, those scenes could be far more perverse and disturbing. The
scene when Rusk was desperately fishing out a decorative pin of Babs from the
potato truck when he believed that the pin would confirm him as the murderer,
and when he had to literally snap the dead body’s fingers one by one to remove
the pin, with the sound effects, were both perverse and darkly comedic at the
same time. Even inspector Oxford ’s
wife provided some curious comic relief. Believing herself as a talented chef,
she cooked up really unappetizing, or even disgusting, dishes for Oxford , and that seemed
to complement the perverse and weird atmosphere throughout the film. Perhaps
her random intuitions would be far more contributive than the food she was
feeding Oxford
with!
Film critics have identified a memorable sequence in
‘Frenzy’, which has been championed by the great philosopher Deleuze and have
been featured in many textbooks of film. This iconic sequence was a well
executed long take, which was facilitated by a planned and almost mechanical
camera movement. The extended tracking shot chronicled Babs being lured by
Rusk, and followed him to his apartment for some apparent romantic overtures.
They took a lengthy stroll through the streets and eventually entered his
apartment after travelling up a staircase in a dimly lit setting. After the
door was closed, the camera, almost in a mechanical manner, traveled back down
the stairs in a backward tracking shot, and finally to the exterior of the
apartment building. It looked as if the camera was retreating, like an
imaginary person, from some scary thing that was going to happen. Indeed, it
was exactly what Hitchcock has put in words in the shooting script:
‘THE CAMERA, as if saying goodbye to Babs, retreats down the
stairs and out through the front door.’
This memorable sequence has already been analyzed in many
textbooks or film courses, and I would like to provide my viewpoints here. From the way the sequence was executed, I
feel that Hitchcock was trying to establish a symmetric or circular
relationship. The first half of the sequence involved the flirtation of Rusk
towards Babs, who would be his next victim. Hitchcock neatly divided the whole
scenario into two halves, and the two components were dialectal to each other
in terms of characteristics. The streets were brightly lit and lively with human
activities, while the apartment staircases were darkly lit, cold and empty. For the direction of the camera, the first
half was often forward and was focusing on the two characters’ faces, while the
second half was a rather unusual backward tracking movement. Hitchcock was wise not to show the fate of
Babs, somehow as a testament of the tragic inevitability of death when she has stepped
into the killer’s web. He was indeed a lady charmer and lady killer! For the
movement of the camera throughout the whole sequence, it almost looked as if it
was travelling in a circular path. The circle came together at the end, albeit
with pretty deadly conclusion. Picture that when the neck tie killer strangled
his victim, he had to use the tie to form a circle around the victim’s neck,
right?
I can see a further analogy regarding this wonderful
tracking shot. Through the camera’s mechanical movement, the whole process
appeared like a roller-coaster ride. When the victim was lured and escorted up
to the top floor when the apartment was situated, an empty carriage moved down.
And soon, the killer would take another victim into this murderous thrill ride,
and led to her demise – because the obsession from Rusk’s perverse psychology
would never end. The circular movement symbolized the painful cycle that the
murder rampage would happen again and again, until someone could put a final stop
on it.
Are you wearing your tie?
by Ed Law
22/4/2017
Film Analysis
