Although today people are accustomed to seeing something more explicit, I think the scene went just as far as Hitchcock wanted it to go.
By Hitchcock standards it is very graphic.
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The "new freedom of movies" arrived with the ratings code in November of 1968, with these categories:
G
M
R
X
Hitchcock sought to do something in the "R" range, but his first "post-code movie" was 1969's "Topaz," which was given an M (a PG today) and had little to justify even that, except -- I would suggest -- a man and wife who cheated on each other but stayed together at the movie's end.
Hitch wanted to go farther and kept reading properties (often one-page memo "coverage") -- 1500 of them, he said -- until he found the book that became Frenzy.
It had a psycho. It had a wrong man. But mainly..it had a psycho who was a sex maniac. Hence nudity and rape and sexual violence. Hitch got his "R" movie, and because he was still such a great artist and story teller, he knew how to make that R hurt and sting and create emotion in his audience. Frenzy isn't built for sexual titillation, it is built for sexual disgust and emotional despair(the innocence of the women Rusk kills.)
In 1960, one critic called Psycho "the sickest movie ever made." And it was -- among American studio films. By 1972, Psycho had a lot of competition. But Frenzy was, indeed, even SICKER than Psycho because that R rating bought Hitchcock the ability to bring sex directly into the psychopathic homicide.
In a profound way.
PS. As if to repent for the R-rated sexual violence and ugliness of Frenzy, Hitchcock's final film was light-hearted, almost free of violence and horror. Family Plot. Not as well made a film as Frenzy, but decidedly nicer. PG. I think Hitchcock wanted to out that way.
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