Even the world’s greatest director had his off days, and Frenzy is one of them. Despite its Psycho-tic title, Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film barely registers a pulse.
In London, women are being murdered by a serial killer whose modus operandi involves strangling them with a necktie. The crimes strike too close to home for Richard Blaney (Jon Finch, The Vampire Lovers) when his ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt, The Plague Dogs) is snuffed out (culminating in a laughable freeze frame meant to be shocking). Not only does this occur right after he’s been sacked from his pub job, but with the same style of tie that populates his daily wardrobe, so the authorities suspect Richard to be the knot-nice killer.
Like Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Richard is not the culprit. That honor goes to his best bud (Barry Foster, Twisted Nerve). But because Hitchcock and Sleuth screenwriter Anthony Shaffer reveal this information with near immediacy, they strip Frenzy of so much of both men’s speciality: suspense. Worse, for something titled Frenzy, the pacing is markedly glacial, further marred by overexplanation — hardly the stuff for which viewers get worked-up.
What is to admire is that Hitch — a guy who began directing in the silent era — continued to push boundaries right up to the end of his brilliant career. Having courted controversy a decade prior for daring to show Janet Leigh in — gasp! — a bra, the old man goes even further here, showing not only bared breasts, but showing them being fondled in close-up and as part of an act of rape. Were mainstream audiences more shocked by that or the movie’s later glimpse of a woman’s postcoital mons pubis? That the conversation no longer takes place — yet we’re still discussing Psycho’s toilet — suggests how minor Frenzy is among Hitch’s filmography. —Rod Lott