Frenzy

The more I watch of Hitchcock, the more I noticed that the movies that veer away from his tried and true bag of cliches are the ones that stick with me the most. Not that his formulas don't work, because they do; espionage movies like The 39 Steps, and man-on-the-run movies like North By Northwest are enjoyable. It's when Hitch would venture outside of these frequently traveled topics that I enjoyed the most. Frenzy, ostensibly, tries to be a little bit of both. It is a return to similar ground covered in Psycho -- following a murderer with a thread of psycho-sexual deviance -- and the man-on-the-run genre. A man, through a series of frankly preposterous coincidences any writing teacher would condemn as contrivances, gets blamed for a serial killer in London that sexually assaults women and strangles them with a necktie. The movie shows us the killer, so there's no mystery element here; Frenzy is about how the wrong man is held accountable for it, and what will trip up the real killer. Frenzy was HItchcock's first movie fully made and released after the transition from the puritanical Hays Code and to the MPAA rating system we all know. This change gave filmmakers newfound artistic freedom; hallowed institutions like the church and the police didn't have to be portrayed as true-north babyfaces all the time. Violence was no longer sanitized. Sexuality was now open to discuss and show. As much as it is a positive to have these tools available in a storyteller's toolbox, Hitchcock always managed to work around the Hays Code effectively. Norman Bates' conflicting morality over sexuality -- finding women alluring but only from a distance, a sort of self-shaming coming from his split personality with Mother -- was a hell of a balancing act, and it was pulled off gracefully. Marnie dealt with PTSD and how it affects sexuality. Vertigo had a guy so obsessed with his dead girlfriend, he makes his current one dress like the dead one. Even Rear Window had Grace Kelly wearing some conservative but still alluring lingerie and sending every signal to Jimmy Stewart short of positioning landing lights towards her vagina. Point is, Hitch knew how to work sexuality -- both healthy and unhealthy -- into his work. He also knew how to show violence and horror; the shower scene in Psycho, which shows far less than the Mandela Effect has convinced you it does is a perfect example. So what does Hitch do when the Hays Code is no longer constricting him? Unfortunately for Frenzy, the answer isn't good. Without the barriers, what was once on the periphery is now dragged into the spotlight, but in an entirely unsatisfactory way. Frenzy is all too enthusiastic to show you all the lurid details its predecessors had to keep hidden. Within the first minute, we see a naked female dead body, bare backside clearly visible. It is far, far from the only nudity this movie has to offer. I'm not complaining about seeing the female form here; it is the way in which it is applied here. Let me make a comparison; in Halloween, there is a notorious shot of PJ Soles topless. She thinks her boyfriend has come back into the bedroom to have sex again (it's really Michael Myers), so she drops the sheet covering her breasts and coyly says "see anything you like?". Now, nobody will argue the viewer needed to see her breasts. But the nudity makes sense from a narrative point of view; she's being playfully seductive, and she was naked anyway from just having had sex. There is context for the nudity. The nudity in Hitchcock never feels necessary. There was no reason for the corpse at the beginning to be naked in the river. Nor to see a flash of breast during the sexual assault scene that triggers the mistaken identity portion of the story. Nor the protagonist's girlfriend's naked silhouette, or watching her slowly put on socks (and nothing else) to go to the bathroom in an entirely unnecessary scene. Nor the corpse in bed at the end of the movie. Hitchcock finally had the opportunity to show naked women, and he decided to do it every chance he got, regardless if the story called for it. And it never really does. It leaves Frenzy feeling juvenile and prurient. That's to say nothing of the agonizingly protracted sexual assault scene that's a good minute, minute and a half, but feels ten times that, and is too in-your-face and uncomfortable. Like the rampant nudity, it feels like Hitchcock decided that because he could, he should, without bothering to justify it within the context of the movie. There is a way this all could've worked too, had Hitch looked south to Italy at the burgeoning giallo genre. As much as I've said Hitchcock revels in his newfound freedom, it's also oddly constrained. Had Frenzy been made with giallo's garish color palate, its penchant for turning violence into a silly spectacle, and how it openly embraces sexuality and nudity as part of its cheesy tapestry, it would've made the movie feel more like itself. Its lurid intentions would've been fully realized instead of used repeatedly but half-heartedly and ineffectively. Hitchcock also could've gone the opposite direction and actually EXPLORED the depths of this psycho-sexual monster, delve into what makes him tick. Psycho is a perfect template for that; Norman Bates is a sad, lonely man, haunted by his oppressive, judgmental mother. He wants a woman, but he feels ashamed by his own desires. Frenzy offers none of that; here's a charming killer, here's a sad sack protagonist, and that's it. The protagonist doesn't get much depth either; we know he's had an unfortunate streak of luck in life in recent times, but he's so bitter and hostile about it, he's unsympathetic. What do we actually know about him that makes him worth following? Frenzy isn't bothered with that. Another issue I found with Frenzy is its pacing. Frenzy will switch characters and go long stretches without checking in on the other ones, giving them the feeling of being frozen in the narrative. There's a very long sequence where the killer has to find the dead body he disposed of to get back incriminating evidence. It is a long process that feels 20 minutes in length easily. I have no idea how long it actually took, but for this entire sequence, in which we watch a psychopathic sex killer hunt in the back of a potato truck for a corpse and have "comic" hijinks, the protagonist (who is a rather dour and unpleasant man anyway, and far less charming than the killer) is effectively shelves. And that brings up the comedy! Hitchcock's gallows humor is usually enjoyable, because he usually knows where and when to pull the trigger on a macabre joke. Not here. The humor sticks out like a clown in a church. The potato truck scene, with the killer fumbling through sacks of potatoes, and the load spilling out, and the rigor mortis being so set in that it breaks a pocket knife, could be funny, but it isn't; a character that was sweet and sympathetic was murdered, and we're supposed to find it funny that her dead body is putting up a fight? There's also a ridiculous, go-nowhere comedic subplot about the lead detective and his wife who is taking a gourmet cooking class and concocting some truly inhumane cuisine for her poor, suffering husband. Like we're to believe a cooking school is teaching people to make pigs feet in gravy, or soup with entire fish heads in them, and pass that off as professional, high-quality food. It's a shame Frenzy is held back by all this, because there is a good movie, even a great movie, almost within reach. There are glimpses of it too; the second murder we see, we don't actually see. The killer lures his victim into his apartment, we hear a phrase he used in the first murder, and then the camera slowly pans back down the stairs and out the apartment building in silence. The movie abandons the everybody's-a-professional attitude and takes places in the streets of London, giving it a more down-to-earth feeling. Much of the movie takes place in the daytime, giving the movie some brightness and energy. And, in theory, I love the idea of Hitchcock without guardrails, free to indulge in the shadowy whims and grotesque ideas that were only hinted at from the periphery before. But in practice, it was those guardrails that made him tell a great story. It made him innovate. The storytelling and the direction worked hand in hand. This doesn't feel like an artist unleashed. It feels like a teenage boy allowed to wallow in his perversions and yell tasteless jokes at the worst times. It feels like an artist losing touch with the art form and throwing things against the wall to see if anything sticks. If it didn't have Hitchcock's name, it would be derided as a Hitchcock knock-off.