FRENZY (1972)–4K restoration screened at Film Forum
I have been living with FRENZY for more than 50 years. The first film I saw in a movie theater by my own choice was John Guillermin’s SKYJACKED (1972) at the Washington Township Cinema in New Jersey. The trailer for FRENZY played before the movie.
I was finally able to see the movie itself on television a year or so later. It was a Saturday night, mom and dad were having a “date night,” and grandma and grandpa were babysitting. Grandpa sat in the kitchen–he did not want to see the movie–but grandma was game, and we watched.
By this time, I was both a nascent cinephile and an emergent Hitchcockian, and loved the movie–as far as I understood it. I watched it over the years, and purchased its (flawed) DVD edition, but refrained from the Blu-ray due to the consistent bad reviews it received.
I can say that the restoration is superb–no more color problems, filmic appearance, and not restored to the point that Hitchcock’s beloved rear projections are over-restored (a problem I had with the TOPAZ 4K restoration–I felt that the improvements erased some of the original’s softness, thereby rendering Hitchcock’s artifice too artificial, and throwing me out of the movie).
As for the film itself–it remains the grand masterpiece I have always believed it to be. FRENZY is the perfect melding of two of Hitchcock’s favorite narrative streams: the wrong man and the serial killer. He braids these streams together by having the wrong man be close friends with killer, to the point that he is mistaken for the murderer. Also, this is the nastiest wrong man in the Hitchcock canon–not Robert Donat or Henry Fonda (Abe Lincoln!) or Cary Grant–but Jon Finch. I saw the film with some young colleagues, and one noted that when Blaney hears about the killing of his wife, and then about the death of Babs, the first thing he does is think about how their murders will affect him! There is not a scintilla of concern over the deaths of these women, who were so important in his life. Intellectually, I had always known that Blaney was AH’s least pleasant wrong man, but my colleague’s observation made me realize just how unpleasant he is (and AH’s radicalness in making him so).
As for the rape/murder scene–is it horrid? Yes–but in a new way for Hitchcock. He makes his audience confront the situation/fate of women in a patriarchal society. While one can enjoy the aesthetic mastery of Marion Crane’s death in PSYCHO–the editing!! the music!! the pullback shot from Marion’s eye!!–in FRENZY there is just the horror of violence against a woman/women put nakedly on display as both spectacle and chastisement.
Then we are on the verge of a second killing, but Hitchcock says enough–the camera retreats down the staircase, refusing to enter Rusk’s apartment to witness the murder of Babs. He will not feed our voyeuristic desires (I have always maintained that slasher/serial killer movies that flowed from PSYCHO completely ignored FRENZY’s repudiation of the template. The subsequent films/filmmakers erase FRENZY, and its advances, from the cinematic memory).
Inspector Oxford is the spiritual descendent of Inspector Hubbard from DIAL “M” FOR MURDER. Just has Hubbard has to find out the source of the money Tony Wendice is spending, so Oxford cannot get Blaney’s cry that “It’s Rusk!” out of his conscience. In Hitchcock’s world, justice is possible, but the path there hangs by the slightest of threads.
The audience I saw the film with had the constricted laughs that FRENZY elicits, and jumped when Rusk suddenly appears behind Babs, testament to Hitchcock’s ability to pull an audience’s strings. It was a delight to see his talent still in full flower all these years later, and with a new audience.
From the beginning of British cinema, through the peak of Classical Hollywood, Hitchcock was the master–ever adapting, learning, and growing. With FRENZY, he absorbed the lessons/challenges of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. He took what he learned from these filmmaker and their films, mixed it with his five decades of filmmaking experience, and created his most profound and greatest film.
If at all possible, see it on screen, but at the least, watch it on the restored 4k Blu-ray.
