MovieChat Forums > Frenzy (1972) Discussion > The Tongues (Spoilers)

The Tongues (Spoilers)

posted 7 years ago by Underdog_73 (768)
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I can't believe I can't find a topic about this. I know the humor was unintentional, but it really took me out of the film.

After Brenda Blaney is sexually assaulted and murdered, the camera immediately flashes to her face with her eyes wide open and tongue hanging out to the side so unnaturally far that no one could take it seriously. It was like the expression someone would make in jest when spoofing a strangling death. The woman at the end had the same crazy face.

I can't believe a any self respecting director would think that didn't look ridiculous. That face, after a traumatic scene, was utter comedy. It was a joke, and not in a good sense. I was actually embarrassed for Hitchcock. Maybe times were just different, but I can't ever see that expression as not being ludicrous.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I hear you on this, but I think Hitchcock knew what he was doing here. He HAD to...because he had to direct the actresses to stick the tongues out in the first place.

My guess is that Hitchcock looked at police photos of actual strangling victims, and likely saw the tongues always hanging out. He then saw this as a twisted, darkly comic "motif" for the aftermath of his murder scenes.

A still publicity photograph was made of Barbara Leigh-Hunt, dead and strangled in her office chair; it appeared in the 1972 Newsweek positive review of Frenzy. With her eyes popped out in death, necktie round her neck(ANOTHER major motif of these strangling scenes; in the book, a tie wasn't used) the tongue hanging down had an immediate "visercal impact." It WAS funny, to be sure, but grotesque and stylized at the same time.

This shot of Brenda dead with her tongue out appears in the movie , just after Rusk rises up to look at Brenda Blaney, satisfied that she is dead. There's her face and...and this is where I think things go wrong..Ron Goodwin's score hits too hard -- trumpets. Its a poor echo of Janet Leigh's dead face on the bathroom floor in Psycho.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

TRIVIA: Hitchcock ran into trouble with his screenwriter, Anthony Shaffer, and some Universal execs, I think, by trying to "elaborate" on the tongue-hanging-out motif. He filmed -- and intended to use -- a final extreme close-up of Brenda Blaney's TONGUE -- only the tongue -- with saliva dripping off of it in death. That, warned writer Shaffer, was a step too far in the grotesque, and the shot was cut. (I imagine this weird piece of film -- a dripping tongue-close up -- somewhere in the vaults at Universal.)

TRIVIA: Some documentary footage of the making of Frenzy shows Hitchcock in a chair sitting next to the nude woman found in Rusk's bed at the film's end. The covers are pulled up over her breasts.The woman is young and clearly alive(of course) and Hitchcock is sitting there asking "How's your mother?" (Turns out Hitchcock actually DID know the young woman's mother.) After the conversation is over, Hitchcock nods for the scene to be prepared for action. A man pulls the covers back down to expose the young woman's breasts, she sticks her tongue out and becomes "dead." Its pretty weird to watch. But she does stick out her tongue, on Hitchcock's direction.

All said, none of this is meant to refute your dislike of the "tongue motif," but rather to suggest that for better or worse, Hitchcock wanted the tongues to be part of the deal.