... and it is quite possibly his most 'adult' work to date, the only Alfred Hitchcock movie to receive an "18" certificate here in the UK, and I still give it 9/10.
shareIt's definitely a movie I appreciated more on the second watch, though I still found it unpleasant. But you know what's weird? It's that even though every time I say "wow that was unpleasant," I still get the urge to rewatch it every now and then because the brilliant stuff really does work. Who knows-- by the time I rewatch it a third time, I might love it.
shareMaybe because the movie was SUPPOSED to be "unpleasant" and "unpleasant" alone does NOT negate its overall quality, right?
shareBut then I dare say, that for a movie that actually dealt with some seriously disturbing subject matter, it was actually done rather tastefully and with restraint and subtlety and the disturbing themes and scenes of sexual and otherwise violence were never too over the top or gratuitous and were necessary enough for the story and subject at hand to work.
shareFrom the distance of many years, I rather find Hitchcock's Frenzy to be akin to Eastwood's Unforgiven...though Unforgiven was bigger hit and a Best Picture winner.
But the kinship is this. Hitchcock with Frenzy and Eastwood with Unforgiven got "comeback movies" after a period of time in which critics and studios alike though they were "almost over."
With Hitchcock, age was an issue. Marnie, Torn Curtain, and Topaz were considered films of decline.
With Eastwood, his rather "cheapjack" formula for making movies had deserted him in the late 80's: Dirty Harry V(The Dead Pool) was trounced at the summer box office by the bigger boom-boom of Die Hard , and then Eastwood delivered a series of box office flops, both arty(White Hunter, Black Heart) and not(Pink Cadillac, The Rookie.) It has been written that studios stopped offering Eastwood projects in favor of OTHER older stars(Redford, Caan.)
But Hitchocck came back with Frenzy. And Eastwood came back with Unforgiven. And here's the thing:
Neither film was a "slam bang audience pleasing entertainment." Both films were grim and violent and bleak and ...disturbing. Both films reflected the attitudes of two aging Hollywood icons about screen violence and the genres in which they made their names.
Frenzy had no stars in the cast. Unforgiven had OLD stars in the cast(Eastwood -- in a rare gesture at the time-- found room for co-stars: Hackman, Freeman, Harris.)
But then I dare say, that for a movie that actually dealt with some seriously disturbing subject matter, it was actually done rather tastefully and with restraint and subtlety and the disturbing themes and scenes of sexual and otherwise violence were never too over the top or gratuitous and were necessary enough for the story and subject at hand to work.
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Yes. Hitchcock made several decisions when making Frenzy. One was that only ONE rape murder would be shown, start to finish; it haunts the rest of the movie as more victims are claimed. The other decision was to "break up" both the rape and the murder into certain parts:
The build-up: Rusk and Brenda have an argumentative conversation and slowly he reveals sexual interest in her and that he's not going to take no for an answer.
The rape: A couple of shots communicate nudity and the act, but Hitchcock discreetly keeps his camera on the victim's face and she distracts us with her prayer. (Later, we learn from the cops that Rusk was impotent and couldn't perform this deed without murder attached.)
The murder: Here is the most disturbing part of the scene...and the most lengthy and detailed. The strangulation by necktie is "broken up into montage" like the Psycho shower scene and the attack in the bedroom in The Birds...but there is no music(ala Psycho) and Hitch lingers a bit on the "reality" of strangulation and the taking of the life of a woman who absolutely did nothing to deserve this. THAT hurts.
On all sides of this horrible (but artful) scene, Hitchocck overloads the story with great narrative structure and dialogue(by Anthony Shaffer, who wrote Sleuth) and all manner of style: neckties, potatoes and how Covent Garden figures into everything.
It IS a great movie. The R-rated sex and violence was perhaps something that Hitchcock felt he HAD to do, but he did it with restraint and style.
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Note in passing: the same 1972 summer of Frenzy had an action Western called "Hannie Caulder" which opens with three murderous buffoons(Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Strother Martin) taking turns raping Raquel Welch. Its an aggravating scene, but not particularly disturbing, because the filmmaker takes no time to stage it. We get shots of Borgnine, Elam and Martin yelling and making faces, and shots of Welch struggling but - - it simply doesn't feel as REAL as what Hitchcock did in Frenzy. Which is why Frenzy is art, and Hannie Cauder is not.
It's definitely a movie I appreciated more on the second watch, though I still found it unpleasant. But you know what's weird? It's that even though every time I say "wow that was unpleasant," I still get the urge to rewatch it every now and then because the brilliant stuff really does work. Who knows-- by the time I rewatch it a third time, I might love it
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I think once gets past "that scene" in Frenzy, its other very strong attributes reveal themselves. Like many of the best Hitchcocks, we don't quite realize how good it is -- and how it is working on us -- until after a few viewings.
Example: the scene that famously begins with "Got a place to stay"(from the evil Bob Rusk, who suddenly materializes behind Babs, his next victim) is a suspense scene, but also a scene of cinematic tricks and power from start to finish. Hitchcock cuts the sound before "Got a place to stay?" is heard...and at the end of the sequence, we will get the famous "Farewell to Babs" staircase retreat as Rusk rape-kills Babs offscreen.
In between, though, we get a GREAT one-take travelling shot through Covent Garden of Rusk accompanying Babs to his flat. We notice that his tie --for the first time in the movie -- is a big bright purple tie. It stands out. We know it is his weapon and Babs will soon die from it if no help arrives(and in Frenzy -- no help EVER arrives.) Babs' bright orange suit-dress will figure as evidence later in the story -- and a sad reminder of the woman who wore it. And the scene ends (at the door to Rusk's building) with a dark, dark line from Rusk to Babs: "...after all...you've got the whole of your life ahead of you."
I didn't notice all the details, costume decisions, camera moves and lines the FIRST time I saw this scene, but boy can I find them now. They are how a Hitchcock movie at its best "works on you, and draws you in."
Frenzy was excellent but is a bit overshadowed by some of Hitch's other hits
Just that one scene where The Strangler is hiding under the potatoes in the back of that produce truck from the cops and you catch yourself rooting for the bastard to escape...
Brilliant work by everyone involved in producing that scene
30 seconds after that scene I was like 'what the hell is wrong with me?!
...Such an effective and tense thriller
Just that one scene where The Strangler is hiding under the potatoes in the back of that produce truck from the cops and you catch yourself rooting for the bastard to escape...
Brilliant work by everyone involved in producing that scene
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Yes..as a technical matter, something like 116 shots in the sequence -that's a LOT of edits.
As a narrative/emotional matter -- yes, we are asked to ROOT for the bastard.
Hitchcock had done this before when killer Robert Walker dropped an incriminating lighter down a storm drain in "Strangers on a Train." His long straining attempt to reach it with his fingers put us "on his side" -- even though he wants to use that lighter to falsely incriminate another man for HIS murder.
The potato truck scene mixes the Robert Walker scene with Anthony Perkins cleaning up the murder and disposing of the body in Psycho -- and there, too, even if we don't think Perkins is the killer, we identify with a crook covering up the murder of a good person.
I would like to add here that while feminists picketed Frenzy in 1972, to me it has a very favorable view towards women -- and less so towards men:
Brenda Blaney is more successful in business than her ex-, Richard Blaney(and nicer.)
Mrs. Oxford refuses to believe that Blaney is the killer -- her husband Inspector Oxford is sure that Blaney IS the killer...but he is wrong. ("What do you mean," Mrs. Blaney says at the end, "WE put the wrong man away -- YOU put him away.")
Babs Milligan is , in many ways, the most helpful and humane character in the movie -- SHE trusts Blaney when others don't, SHE loves him -- and Hitchcock cruelly has Rusk kill her off.
Hetty Porter is the tough wife to the goofy husband(How DID those two end up married?) and wears the pants in the family. (I'm guessing she was a sexy waitress who married her pub-owner boss and has regretted it ever since.)
And even that briefly-seen couple at Brenda's marriage agency prove to be a match between a big, battleax woman and a meek milquetoast man. SHE wears the pants in that new marriage.
Frenzy is about man-woman relationships circa 1972, as women started to assert themselves and men tried to go along to get along(the Oxford dinners.)
And then there is...Bob Rusk..a man who hates women and wants to take them sexually by force and kill them. A man who is rebelling against the assertions of women in his own, horrible way.
Frenzy isn't JUST about suspense and style...it has themes. Men. Women. Marriage. The difficulties therein. Sex.
A great exchange between Mrs. Oxford and Inspector Oxford:
Mrs. Oxford: A man rapes his ex-wife after ten years of marriage? You and I have only been married 8 years, and I can hardly get you to look at me.
Oxford: That may well be, but I don't knock you about , or make you do degrading things.
A sad, mature exchange. Sex is over with the Oxfords, but the husband offers that at least he isn't a sexual abuser.
There's got to be an in-between.
There are a few avenues to spend some time on with this movie, I think it's one of Hitchcock's top three best works
Nice observations as always ecarle, much obliged
It's an example of masterful movie making
Sir Alfred tricked us all into rooting for a serial killer for a few minutes
Damn fine trick!
Yeah and its also fascinating how he does deal with having a character "wrongly accused" of gruesome sex crimes and violent murders and while he makes no excuses whatsoever for the lead antagonist, he doesn't paint the whole scenario as that to which the hero fights the villains and defeats him. (Although in some ways, it does come close.)
The film even manages to cast a shadow on society including instances where people wrongly and highly inappropriately joke or make foolish statements about sexual abuse, and that is something no doubt wrong and serious and also resonates with us in the digital age even today nearly 50 years later.
And that ending, yeah, he cleverly made it almost ambiguous, although, SPOILER, I believe they ultimately arrest that neck tie strangler.
In any case, still a great movie and 9/10 I will give it. Oh and by the way, I might as well consider Alfred Hitchcock to be my second most favorite film director after Stanley Kubrick. :)
It's a ripoff of No Way to Treat a Lady, so I don't hold it in high regard.
sharePerhaps. Nice to see you here as well minababe, are you much of a Hitchcock fan?
Also, what did you think about the discussion taking place above on this film's page, about the themes of sexual violence in "Frenzy" AND in movies in general?
It's a ripoff of No Way to Treat a Lady, so I don't hold it in high regard.
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Fair enough. That came out in 1968, with Rod Steiger as a psychotic strangler stalking women in NYC, along with The Boston Strangler (Tony Curtis played that real-life nut) the same year. I guess you might say that after the bloody stabbings of Psycho, we had a "strangler" period for awhile. (Frenzy could be called "the London Strangler.") By the way, the Frenzy strangler was based on several real-life British psycho killers.
And people forget: Halloween in 1978 was considered "a return to the slasher film", but Michael Myers strangles a couple of his victims and stabs others. Its a "Psycho/Frenzy" hybrid.
Yeah and its also fascinating how he does deal with having a character "wrongly accused" of gruesome sex crimes and violent murders and while he makes no excuses whatsoever for the lead antagonist, he doesn't paint the whole scenario as that to which the hero fights the villains and defeats him. (Although in some ways, it does come close.)
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One critic who didn't much like Frenzy said "the movie keeps focusing on one character while forgetting the other." Blaney and Rusk only share a few scenes and the big suspense is -- Blaney DOESN'T KNOW that Rusk is the real killer for whose crimes he is being blamed, til the very end. Compare that to Strangers on a Train, where Guy Haines DOES know that Bruno Anthony strangled(STRANGLED) his estranged wife(ESTRANGED WIFE - -hey.)
In "Strangers on a Train," Guy DOES fight Bruno in a big spectacular sequence on a runaway carousel. Frenzy was made when Hitchcock was more old and tired and wasn't given the budget for that sort of climax.
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The film even manages to cast a shadow on society including instances where people wrongly and highly inappropriately joke or make foolish statements about sexual abuse, and that is something no doubt wrong and serious and also resonates with us in the digital age even today nearly 50 years later.
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It still happens, yes? Idle gossip without any consideration for the true horrors of sex murder. We get this exchange between a barmaid and a male lawyer:
Barmaid: I 'ear he rapes 'em first, doesn't he?
Lawyer: Well, I suppose every cloud has a silver lining...
Then the lawyer goes on to say how these rape murders are "so good for the tourist trade" --conjuring up Jack the Ripper publicity.
THEN..a few scenes later, we experience the horrible reality (in real time) of a rape-strangling murder, and the jokes catch in our throats.
And that ending, yeah, he cleverly made it almost ambiguous, although, SPOILER, I believe they ultimately arrest that neck tie strangler.
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Oh, I think Rusk is busted. And I sure hope that Richard Blaney smacked him some good ones with that tire iron.
The film is ironic: the "airtight" case against Blaney collapses and a NEW airtight case comes down on Rusk(potato dust is key.) It was that easy to nail the RIGHT man.
We also felt Blaney's pain in his being yelled at by the judge for committing the horrible sex killings that RUSK committed. Now -- finally -- Rusk will take the blame that is rightfully his, and the punishment. (An asylum more likely than prison, I suppose.)
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In any case, still a great movie and 9/10 I will give it.
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Good for you! It is great...disturbing, but great, and necessary for Hitchcock to make in that time.
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Oh and by the way, I might as well consider Alfred Hitchcock to be my second most favorite film director after Stanley Kubrick. :)
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I like 'em both, Hitchcock more -- he made more movies over more decades, got more "at bats."
I'm always tickled that in the 70's, Hitchcock only made two films(Frenzy, Family Plot) and Kubrickonly made two films(A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon). Kubrick's were considered much bigger deals but I think Hitchcock's were of great value, too.
It's not so much the "strangler" theme that makes Frenzy a rip off of No Way to Treat a Lady. Like Frenzy, that movie also used dark humor for what was such a grim subject. Also, just like in No Way to Treat a Lady, there's a running joke in which we constantly see the detective being fed dinner. In Frenzy, it's his wacky wife cooking him really disgusting, weird stuff. In No Way to Treat a Lady, it's his mother babying him like the stereotypical Jewish mother that she portrays.
shareIt's not so much the "strangler" theme that makes Frenzy a rip off of No Way to Treat a Lady. Like Frenzy, that movie also used dark humor for what was such a grim subject.
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I liked No Way to Treat a Lady, though, at the end of the day, it couldn't be as good (in certain ways) as a Hitchcock movie because it didn't have the cinematic flair of a Hitchcock movie(116 edits in the potato truck scene.)
There's also the gimmick that Rod Steiger wears disguises and accents to commit his murders: Irish priest, German plumber...cross dressing woman.
There's also the issue that Steiger is NOT a rapist (that we see.)
I rather like No Way to Treat a Lady MORE than Frenzy because it has three bona fide movie stars in it: George Segal(hero), Lee Remick(heroine), Rod Steiger(killer.) I rather like Frenzy more than No Way to Treat a Lady because...well, Hitchcock. The set-pieces. The neckties. Covent Garden.
I had not thought before of how close the meals in "Lady" (from the mother) are to the meals in Frenzy -- but I will take the point. The "Oxford dinners" are not in the novel from which Frenzy was taken. Perhaps Hitchcock (who watched everybody else's films all the time) borrowed the idea from No Way to Treat a Lady.
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In all honesty, I don't really look too deeply into this film, and for the following reasons:
1. By the 1960s, Hitchcock was so far gone in terms of his obsession with rape and murder that he was basically using his movies as a vehicle to experience these things vicariously. I can't go into detail for the sake of character limit, but after Psycho, his movies were less about showing these things from a storytelling viewpoint than about putting himself (and the audience) in the shoes of the rapist and murderer so they can experience these acts firsthand.
After being constrained by censorship, he finally had the chance to blow his wad (so to speak) with Frenzy, and that's what the movie is. It was him basically trying to do the type of movie he'd always wanted to do since Psycho but couldn't because of the Hays Code.
2. Hitchcock, in spite of being an esteemed director, spent his entire career basically riffing cheesy B movies when he suddenly ran out of ideas, and to me, Frenzy looks exactly like what happened when he saw Woman on the Run and The Stranger. He saw No Way to Treat a Lady, went, "I'd like to do that!" and then did his own version.
I haven't seen any of his post The Birds films because everyone says they are crap. I made an exception with Marnie. Didn't disliked it but I don't think I'll see it again.
shareI don't know if this has been mentioned here already, but I've always felt, since my first viewing of this movie, that it contains one of the best, most ironic endings ever when the inspector calmly notes, "Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie."
share1. By the 1960s, Hitchcock was so far gone in terms of his obsession with rape and murder that he was basically using his movies as a vehicle to experience these things vicariously. I can't go into detail for the sake of character limit, but after Psycho, his movies were less about showing these things from a storytelling viewpoint than about putting himself (and the audience) in the shoes of the rapist and murderer so they can experience these acts firsthand.
After being constrained by censorship, he finally had the chance to blow his wad (so to speak) with Frenzy, and that's what the movie is. It was him basically trying to do the type of movie he'd always wanted to do since Psycho but couldn't because of the Hays Code.
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The Frenzy board here doesn't get much traffic -- like a post every 3 years or so. Today, it got a "flurry" of posts, and they are heading in the usual direction: (1) Frenzy is a good, maybe great film VS (2) Hitchcock finally had the chance to blow his wad so to speak.
This argument has raged, frankly, since Frenzy came out -- was the old man just making unknown actors act out his worst sex-murder fantasy, or...was Hitchcock trying to impress upon us all just how horrific sex crimes could be? Hitchcock told one interviewer: "Ten years ago I could not have filmed this scene with the same detail and the audience would have missed something crucial: seeing the killer at work."
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I've read up on Frenzy over the years. Critic David Thomson wrote of the rape-murder scene: "It is most exploitative of the actress." Yet the actress -- Barbara Leigh-Hunt -- gave an interfview where she said "I believe that it was necessary for the scene to be that graphic..to show how this killer operated and what he was capable of." She gave no sense of being "exploited." It was an acting job for Alfred Hitchcock (with a body double for the nude bits.)
2. Hitchcock, in spite of being an esteemed director, spent his entire career basically riffing cheesy B movies
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As Hitchcock said, "I've made some very good movies out of very mediocre material." He meant the books and plays he adapted for the screen.
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when he suddenly ran out of ideas, and to me, Frenzy looks exactly like what happened when he saw Woman on the Run and The Stranger. He saw No Way to Treat a Lady, went, "I'd like to do that!" and then did his own version.
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I would concur that No Way To Treat a Lady may have inspired him. He had tried to get ANOTHER movie called Frenzy off the ground in 1967, about a New York City psychopath, and Universal rejected it(THAT never used to happen to Hitch.) So a year after his failure, maybe he saw No Way To Treat and Lady and thought about it.
And yet, word is that Hitchcock combed through 1500(!) summaries of novels and plays before choosing "Goodbye Picadilly, Farewell Leiceister Square" to get the name Frenzy. The R rating WAS here, and clearly Hitchcock wanted his chance to go "all the way" in sex and violence(at the same time, really.)
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And there's something else. This interview excerpt (I'd have to find it again, this is from memory.):
Interviewer: Your new movie Frenzy has a very graphic rape and murder scene.
Hitchcock: Why not?
Interviewer: Well, its more than you've ever done before.
Hitchcock: I'd say its under the heading of "something worth doing is doing well." (with a mischievous grin.)
Bottom line : Hitchcock, I think, dug the publicfity of being such a bad boy again. This was like how the shower scene was seen(the sickest scene ever filmed) but it was WORSE, because of the overt sexual content. And Hitch reveled int he controversy.
Decades later, Hitchcock's kindred sick soul, Quentin Tarantino said something similar about his movie The Hateful Eight(paraphrased):
Interviewer: In your film, the character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh is punched in the face and beaten continuously by Kurt Russell and others. How do you react to critics who say this glamourizes violence against women?
QT: I say...so what? There are reasons that her character is beaten, and I'm glad I wrote her that way, and sometimes i wish I had her beaten more.
Mr. Hitchcock...meet Mr. Tarantino.
Me, I "rolled with the punches" in both the late Hitchocck film and the Tarantino. I didn't LIKE the scenes particularly, but I understood what the filmmaker was trying to impart, I think.
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I have a big, big problem with Frenzy.
It is this: I read the rave reviews in 1972 BEFORE I saw Frenzy. So MANY of them said it was a great film, a comeback, "Return of Alfred the Great." One called it "one of his very best."
So when I showed up to the theater and saw that scene, I was conflicted: THIS movie is a comeback? THIS movie is Hitchcock at his best? THIS movie? With THIS rape murder scene?
I do believe that a lot of critics of the 70's "dug the dark side," dug the violence. Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull(in 1980)...all of them got good reviews. And Frenzy picked up on that "sick darkness" with its raves.
And thus, my dilemma: I very much love Frenzy for the style, the cinema, the structure, the setting, the set-pieces but...I can't hardly RECOMMEND it to anybody. Certainly not to women.
Frenzy is like a "privately owned" sick Hitchocck movie with a limited fan base...a fan base that is a little ashamed of the picture, frankly. I can wholeheartedly recommend Strangers on A Train, Rear Window, NXNW to anyone. Frenzy -- not so much.
And..given the few posts here at this board, I KNOW this: the more one writes of the sick sexual content of Frenzy...the more one drives away other posters.
He also lifted other movies, not just books or his own material.
For example, the carnival scene from Strangers on a Train is a direct lift from the movie, Woman on the Run.
The tower sequences from Vertigo was an even more blatant lift, this time of Welles' The Stranger (tower scenes). IIRC, Welles put down Vertigo, and I have to wonder if it was because he was annoyed that Hitchcock copied him and didn't give credit where credit was due.
This argument has raged, frankly, since Frenzy came out -- was the old man just making unknown actors act out his worst sex-murder fantasy, or...was Hitchcock trying to impress upon us all just how horrific sex crimes could be? Hitchcock told one interviewer: "Ten years ago I could not have filmed this scene with the same detail and the audience would have missed something crucial: seeing the killer at work."
He also lifted other movies, not just books or his own material.
For example, the carnival scene from Strangers on a Train is a direct lift from the movie, Woman on the Run.
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I have not seen Woman on the Run, but now I want to. By "carnival scene," do you mean the first such scene(the murder of Miriam?) Or the second scene(berserk carousel climax).
If we are talking about the berserk carousel climax I am wondering...was Woman on the Run able to stage such a sequence on the large and detailed scale that Hitchcock did? He had the budget and the technical expertise to turn that SOAT climax into something big and unforgettable. (He did it, by the way, by having TWO carousels built, so that one could be lit and prepared for filming while filming took place on the other one.
If he had to "borrow" the scene to get a better scene, well...that's Hollywood.
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The tower sequences from Vertigo was an even more blatant lift, this time of Welles' The Stranger (tower scenes). IIRC, Welles put down Vertigo, and I have to wonder if it was because he was annoyed that Hitchcock copied him and didn't give credit where credit was due.
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I HAVE seen The Stranger, and yes, a tower figures bigly in the climax -- a clock tower with human figures, one of which actually stabs the villain(by accident) and kills him that way before he falls.
In Vertigo , it is a Spanish mission bell tower in Northern California(the mission is really there; the tower is not.) And none of the story of Vertigo matches the story of The Stranger(which is really a more straightforward thriller with hero, villain, heroine and the bad guy getting it in the end.
Welles may have been before Hitchcock...but Hitchcock was before Welles. Foreign Correspodent has a scene where a hit man tries to kill Joel McCrea at the top of a tall tower...and falls to his own death. Though I think that "tower" was a cathedral.
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Hitchcock's bigger "borrow" from Welles was from "Touch of Evil" (1958), which puts Janet Leigh herself at an isolated countryside motel(in Mexico, near the California border) along with a weird, jumpy motel manager(Dennis Weaver.) Hitchcock cast both Janet Leigh and Mort Mills from " Touch of Evil" into Psycho, and the motel and manager rather foreshadows the Bates Motel and Norman Bates. I HAVE read(from Welles' friend Peter Bogdanovich), that Welles felt Hitchcock stole from Touch of Evil.
Well...yes and no. Touch of Evil is in 1958. Robert Bloch's novel of Psycho is in 1960. Hitchcock's film of Bloch's novel is in 1960. Perhaps BLOCH could be accused of borrowing the motel and weird motel keeper from Welles.
In any event, what happens to Janet Leigh at a motel in Psycho is entirely different from what happens to Janet Leigh in a motel in Touch of Evil. The locales are different(Mexico makes a big difference), the plots are different, the characters are different.
Hitchocck DID announce in the trades that Psycho would open with a long continuous shot(over Phoenix) to beat Welles long continuous opening shot in "Touch of Evil"(over the streets of a border town)...but Hitchcock coujldn't do it.
Though when necessarily, lawsuits settle these things in Hollywood, everybody borrows from everybody in that town. And I think that the "winner" is the one who makes the most unforgettable film and/or biggest box office using the material. Hitchcock was clearly the winner in that regard with Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and Psycho. Though Welles The Stranger is a well-remembered thriller, and he's a great villain in it, and Edward G. Robinson is a fine hero.
Which reminds me: a woman gets attacked in a shower by a figure with a knife in Screaming Mimi, made a year or two before Psycho. But its an outdoor beach shower, the scene lasts only a few seconds and I can't even remember if the woman dies.
Who remembers Screaming Mimi?
Hitchcock has gone on record implying that he was fascinated with capturing murder and mayhem onscreen, not to make a point of it but because it titillated him.
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Hmm..I have not read that statement, but it does seem borne out by a number of his films from Psycho on. I'm willing to acknowledge that there was something a little sick in Hitchcock that dug on filming murder...his contemporary is Quentin Tarantino, who has staged some pretty sick violence himself..."as if to get away with it." For instance, in Inglorious Basterds, a woman is strangled for about as lingering long as the one in Frenzy. The worst of it, I think, is in Death Proof, where psycho Kurt Russell uses his car to basically turn four women into dismembered meat. I did not like that scene -- I think QT went too far(but he would say, no, no, no -- he's a "heavy metal filmmaker.")
That said, if Hitchcock was titillating himself with his murder scenes, he also knew he was titillating a public that dug them, too. Psycho was a blockbuster hit. I might add that the more "prestigious" The Godfather really drew a lot of box office from all the gory murders in THAT one -- its almost a horror movie.
Hitch seemed to take a wrong turn in two movies that were almost back to back: Torn Curtain (1966) in which hero Paul Newman and an anonymous female spy must together overpower and slowly kill an enemy spy with their bare hands and Frenzy(1972) in which we have to watch sex killer Bob Rusk almost arbitrarily elect to rape and strangle a terrified, innocent woman...start to finish.
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Psycho had shock murders, too -- but they were presented(as I've written before) in the BOO! tradition of a monster jumping out to kill as scary music makes it all the more screamable
The killings in Torn Curtain(by a hero) and Frenzy(by a villain) were purposely created WITHOUT music, to get down to the ugly business of taking life out of victim, slowly and painfully. Some critics felt that something had simply changed in Hitchcock, that, suddenly, he wanted to "rub the audience's nose" in violence rather than keeping it exhilarating and non-graphic(see: North by Northwest.)
The brutal killing in Torn Curtain is probably more surprising because it happens in a "romantic spy thriller" with two big stars(Paul Newman and Julie Andrews) and it was rather shocking to see "North by Northwest" turn into "Psycho." The brutal killing in Frenzy was more "on point"(a psycho commits it) -- and the poster said "From the master of shock...a shocking masterpiece." But of course the murder in Frenzy was just more lingering and sickening that the shower murder in Frenzy...and it had sexual assault mixed in to make it worse.
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So...I take your point.
Up to a point.
Because "everything's relative." Hitchcock may have seem to go off the deep end on violence from Psycho on, but even back in the Hays Code forties and fifties, he was filming some pretty brutal stuff. To wit:
Lifeboat 1944: The allied heroes attack the Nazi(Walter Slezak) as a brutal mob and beat his face bloody with a shoe before drowning him overboard. That Nazi earlier amputated a man's leg with a knife. A baby dies, and its mother hangs herself over the side of the boat.
Rope 1948: The movie opens on a close-up of two men strangling an innocent third man, two-on-one in its unfair cruelty and clearly staged to resemble the sexual act at the "climax."
Dial M for Murder(1953) The killer who tries to strangle Grace Kelly (clad only in a filmsy nightgown) pins her down in a simile of rape, but it is the KILLER who gets penetrated...Kelly manages to plunge scissors in his back, and he falls backwards on them in close-up to die from a "final brutal thrust."
So hey...Hitchcock was digging a LOT of brutal murders all through his career. The 60's and the R rating allowed him to go further, but he had always dug it -- as, evidently, had his fans.
I'm reminded, however, that Hitchcock copycat Brian DePalma said of his own movies, "People go to the movies to experience powerful emotion -- and what's more powerful than death itself, particularly by murder?"
The shower murder in Psycho(but not the staircase murder), the murder in Torn Curtain and the murder in Frenzy are all profound in this way: we see a living, breathing, thinking, talking human being slowly reduced to...a lifeless piece of meat, all humanity gone from the husk. There's almost a spiritual aspect to it: if humans can be reduced to meat...don't their souls go SOMEWHERE?
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But in a nicer direction about Hitchcock...and it is there.
For as many murder scenes as he filmed in his life, he surely filmed an equal number of...love scenes.
Or more to the point: kissing scenes.
Particularly in the Hays Code era when simulated sex could not be shown, nor nudity, Hitchcock managed to at once eroticize "the kiss" and make it as romantic as could be:
Grant and Bergman in Notorious, with "the longest kiss in film history" at the beginning and Grant kissing Bergman incessantly to awaken her from her poisoning at the end.
Peck and Bergman in Spellbound, kissing as symbolic doors open.
Grace Kelly's kisses of James Stewart in Rear Window, including the first one she gives him.
Grant and Kelly kissing among fireworks in To Catch a Thief(sexual climax suggested.)
The camera circling the powerful kiss of Kim Novak and James Stewart in the hotel room in Vertigo.
Grant and Eva Marie Saint circling around to kiss on a train in North by Northwest.
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Intriguingly, even as Hitchcock entered his "ultra-violent period" in 1960, he found room right at the beginning of Psycho for a kissing scene(there was no room for romance in the rest of the movie) and added the eroticism of Janet Leigh and John Gavin only wearing half their clothes for the kiss-a-thon in a seedy hotel room.
Torn Curtain has that long, lingering killing of Gromek as its centerpiece, but Newman and Andrews are kissing away in the opening scene and Andrews gives Newman a grateful, long kiss when she learns he is NOT an enemy agent.
Topaz had a passionate kiss between Andre and his Cuban mistress Juanita but it seems that, in the 70's, Hitchcock decided that audiences were done with long erotic kissing scenes.
In Frenzy, Blaney kisses Babs but briefly(and then they're naked in the sack.) In Family Plot, the two couples (Dern/Harris and Devane/Black) TALK about sex incessantly, but never kiss beyond one quick peck Dern gives Harris.
So Hitchcock phased out kissing as he phased in violence BUT..there can be no doubt that he treated his audiences to as much kissing as killing...perhaps he knew those were the TWO things that tittilated his audience the most.
PS. After all those violent killings from Psycho to Frenzy, Hitchcock elected with Family Plot to "tone it down and keep it light" -- no brutal killings, only one death. I think the old man knew he needed to finish his career "nice."
Because "everything's relative." Hitchcock may have seem to go off the deep end on violence from Psycho on, but even back in the Hays Code forties and fifties, he was filming some pretty brutal stuff.
There's almost a spiritual aspect to it: if humans can be reduced to meat...don't their souls go SOMEWHERE?
Well...yes and no. Touch of Evil is in 1958. Robert Bloch's novel of Psycho is in 1960. Hitchcock's film of Bloch's novel is in 1960. Perhaps BLOCH could be accused of borrowing the motel and weird motel keeper from Welles.
I have not seen Woman on the Run, but now I want to. By "carnival scene," do you mean the first such scene(the murder of Miriam?) Or the second scene(berserk carousel climax).
Welles may have been before Hitchcock...but Hitchcock was before Welles. Foreign Correspodent has a scene where a hit man tries to kill Joel McCrea at the top of a tall tower...and falls to his own death. Though I think that "tower" was a cathedral.
I saw it last night for the first time ever, thanks to the new 4k boxset. I wasn't expecting much because it is said all of his post The Birds movies were crap. I really enjoyed it. The grittiness of it all took me by surprise. His previous two movies were very old fashioned for late 60s standards.
Looking forward to watch it again.