FRENZY (1972) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Alfred Hitchcock
Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Barbara Leigh-Hunt,
Anna Massey, Alec McGowen, Vivien Merchant,
Billie Whitelaw, Bernard Cribbins, Jean Marsh
For his next-to-last movie, Alfred Hitchcock went home, all the way back to the produce market in London's Covent Garden, where his father had worked as a greengrocer when Hitch was a kid. It seems that somebody's been going around killing women in the area, raping and then strangling them with a necktie. Hitchcock had toyed with perversion before in his pictures, but by the 1970s, censorship rules were breaking down, and the director's approach to his material, at least in this film, was more overt. Parts of "Frenzy" are fairly nasty, in particular a rape scene featuring Barry Foster and Barbara Leigh-Hunt. At the same time, there's a streak of perverse humor running through it, a lot of it having to do with food. (Watch for the scene with Foster in the back of a lorry, trying frantically to retrieve an in incriminating piece of evidence from a corpse stuffed into a potato sack. Or any scene in which a police inspector played by Alec McGowen tries to choke down his wife's cooking.) "Psycho" and Janet Leigh notwithstanding, this is the only Hitchcock film to show full-on nudity.
