My Favorite Shot -- and Sound -- in Frenzy

I occasionally come to this generally message-free Board -- on Hitchcock's 1970s comeback film -- to make sure that elements of the film ARE saluted. Saluted in terms of why the movie WAS a comeback for Hitchcock, and how the film -- very late in his career and after several flops -- demonstrated EXACTLY why some of us fans WERE fans.

I give you: my favorite shot -- and sound -- in Frenzy.

First the shot -- and the sound -- but also what comes directly ahead of it and directly after it in the film to create a certain "cohesive whole":

The shot: A medium shot. Nighttime, but shot with great clarity and a "blueish tinge." One of the ubiquitous Covent Garden workers steps out of the front door of London apartment building.
He is wearing a worker's apron and a cap. He pushes a wheelbarrow out onto the porch and stops to look around. The wheelbarrow contains a sack of lumpy objects. In classic London tradition, the porch is surrounded by black iron spikes. There is a sense of "a hundred years of history" and contemporary London in that shot.

Hitchcock holds the shot long enough for us to realize some things:

That "typical Covent Garden worker" is actually the villain of Frenzy: Cockney greengrocer Bob Rusk -- who is as intimately connected to Covent Garden in HIS work(running a wholesale distribution stand for fruit), as the more manual workers in Covent Garden are. But he is wearing a worker's outfit as a disguise. Why?

And then we give thought to that sack on the wheelbarrow. The LAST time we saw Bob Rusk in this doorway, he was leading his next murder victim, Babs Milligan(Anna Massey) through the door, up the stairs, into his flat and into her sure death by necktie strangling, with a rape before. (We'd seen all this done before with an earlier victim in detail, but this time, we are spared the sight, as the camera backs all the way out of Babs building to the door we are now standing at again.)

And so -- within this one atmospheric medium shot -- our minds RACE to understanding (That's RUSK! Oh God, no...that sack must CONTAIN Babs!" And we are at once gripped by a certain sadness(about Babs being dead), a certain revulstion(about her fate in that sack) and...a certain "taste for Hitchcock's skill in devising a macabre moment that ranks with all such classic moments in Hitchcock." We DIG what he's done here -- advancing plot, creating atmosphere, making a very specific TYPE of thriiller statement.

But there is more to this shot -- the SOUND over it. As Rusk pushes and rolls the wheelbarrow out to the street porch, Hitchcock's sound men make sure to capture how a wooden wheelbarrow would SOUND: the rickety, clackity-clackity-clack sound of wood and steel, of a creaking wheelbarrow(under the extra weight of a dead body) , and the wheels trying to steer it. And then the wheelbarrow stops and we take it all in.

This one shot is "stand alone macabre genius" . Hitchcock used it to promote Frenzy; and it appeared in the 1972 Time Magazine review of the film. For a time, this shot was the profile picture for Barry Foster's IMDb page, but it has been replaced by a full shot -- also from Frenzy -- of Foster in his first on screen victim's office.

As good as the shot of Rusk with the wheelbarrow on the porch is...the next shot is very great, too: a high overhead long shot of Rusk pushing the wheelbarrow across the street from his flat and into the working area of Covent Garden itself. All closed for the day, empty trucks with skull-like fronts parked in a row, the London skyline in the background(a great matte shot, one of only a few in the realistic Frenzy, shades of Mary Poppins), a late night bell ringing on the soundtrack(Big Ben, perhaps?)

A nice "cluster of Hitchcock detail shots" get Rusk over to a waiting truck and we realize that a plot point planted much earlier -- in the Globe Pub as a sad little potato vendor complained to Rusk about his business and how he had to ship a whole load of potatoes north tonight -- pays off: Babs is in a POTATO SACK, her nude body surrounded BY potatoes, and Rusk puts her sack in with the other potato sacks in the truck(he must have stolen this sack from the truck.) An equally nice "cluster of Hitchcock detail shots" see Rusk toss away his apron, remove his worker's cap, and return to the well dressed man-in-a-suit(sans tie) he usually presents.

Rusk goes back into his apartment building through the door where he emerged and an excellent scene of Hitchockian detail follows: Rusk sips a celebratory brandy while lying on his couch, takes a bit of fruit, moves to pick his teeth with his tiepin and -- realizes the tiepin is missing. In Babs' dead hand. In the potato truck. A great Hitchcock scene continues.

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