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The Motif of the Murder Weapons in Frenzy and Psycho --Neckties and Knives

posted 6 hours ago by roger1 (3683)
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Fairly late in his career, Alfred Hitchcock was asked some sort of deep question along the lines of "do you find it difficult to find strong dramatic themes for your films?"

And Hitchcock replied: "I'll tell you what's difficult. What's difficult is trying to figure out new ways of killing victims in my films. That's really hard."

The interviewer was seeking the metaphysical and Hitchocck replied with the practical.

And yet, his two final "psycho killer films" -- Psycho(1960) and Frenzy(1972) came through in shining colors in creating and immortalizing two particular types of murder weapon and thus ways of killing victims.

Psycho is the much bigger deal, the ground-changing masterpiece. But Frenzy served its own high duties: a GOOD thriller after some dull ones; a return to England and London for a British director transplated to America decades before and "Hitchcock's first and only R-rated movie." Nudity, sex, cussing, ultra-violence. Psycho was given a belated R rating for video in 1984, but went out unrated in 1960(ratings didn't exist yet in America) and with a mild "M" rating(the equivalent today of a PG) in 1969 for re-release.

But to the Frenzy weapon.

In the novel "Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leiceister Square" by Arthur LaBern a Covent Garden homicidal sex maniac named Bob Rusk kills his female victims on three occasions within the book. He strangles all of them. The first two women he strangles with his bare hands. The third -- with a nylon stocking.

One realizes that in preparing to adapt LaBern's novel, Hitchocck and his esteemed screenwriter Anthony Shaffer(Sleuth) . as they worked on the script scene by scene in Hitchcock's office, must have reached a conversation like this:

BEGIN:

Hitchcock: Very well, we have reached the first murder that we will show on screen. This Rusk fellow first rapes his victims, so we will have to cover that tastefully, though I'd like to do nudity in this movie.
Shaffer: Very well, Hitch. But we must be sensitive about the portrayal.
Hitchocck: We will be. But I'm a bit more concerned about how he kills the woman.
Shaffer: Strangling her? Well, you've had a lot of stranglings in your movies. Strangers on a Train had one. And Shadow of a Doubt was ABOUT a strangler -- though we never saw him strangle anyone.
Hitchcock: True. I suppose we COULD have this fellow stab his victim to death, but we did that in Psycho, you know. Rather reserved stabbing for that movie on my list.
Shaffer: Well, how about this...he strangles her with his necktie.
Hitchcock: I rather like that. It would give us what I call a "murder motif." We know the police are hunting him. We could call him The Necktie Strangler.
Shaffer: Or The Necktie Killer to keep it short.
Hitchcock: Yes...the more I think about this idea, the more I like it. It gives the killer an identity to the public. And I daresay would could promote the hell out of neckties as murder weapons in our posters and TV commercials. And since there will be three on-screen victims in this film, if they are ALL killed with neckties, we have continuity.

END

Yes, I daresay it would have taken that much conversation and debate for Hitchcock and Shaffer to decide on the necktie motif. They didn't just switch it in from the manual stranglings by hand.

And the motif paid off in many ways, on screen and off(in publicity), as a matter of theme and a matter of visual style.

TO WIT:

Publicity:

The poster: Swirling neckties became the "poster motif" of Frenzy. Indeed the very logo Frenzy was "swirled and twisted" to parallel a twisting necktie the poster. The poster also carried this tag-line: "A new twist from the original Hitchcock." (The other tagline was fitting: From the Master of Shock -- A Shocking Masterpiece.")

CONT

[–] roger1 (3683) 3 hours ago

The TV commercials: In one very rarely seen commercial from 1972, Hitchcock is in a department store "necktie department" and speaks to the salesman:

Salesman: May I help you, sir?
Hitchcock: Yes, I want to buy some neckties for a friend of mine.
Salesman: Very good, sir.
Hitchcock: ..he uses them to strangle young women...

Camera tightens on the salesman. Two things about him: (1) He's actor Tom Helmore -- 14 years after playing the mysterious Gavin Elster in Vertigo and (2) His expression on Hitchcock's request for murder ties is one of ..sinister, serious complicity. Its a great little ad, with a non-so-famous Hitchcock villailn(in 1972) appearing in a second Hitchocck "film."

The radio ads: I found audio for one of these on YouTube and its rather distressing. Hitchcock announces the necktie as a murder weapon in his new film Frenzy and we hear -- staged, not as in the film -- the croaking, gasping voice of a woman being strangled. Nasty stuff. (Though various TV ads and the theatrical trailer ended with Brenda Blaney's scream "My God! The tie!" before HER nasty death.)

The theatrical trailer: In an attempt to harken back to his Psycho trailer of 1960, Hitchocck is our "host" -- floating down the Thames(a dummy and then a faked close up of him speaking), in Covent Garden with potatoes, and then -- in very silly bit, appearing on screen to put a very goofy neckie on and saying screen right: "How do you like my tie?" Whereupon: "My God! The tie!" Frenzy was a very sophisticated movie, but this was not a sophisticated trailer. Still -- the necktie motif was the sales pitch.

CONT

[–] roger1 (3683) 3 hours ago

Promotional items: Universal gifted press people and theater owners with "Frenzy neckties" with the movie's title on the ties.

STYLE: Before he is revealed to us as the Necktie Killer, Bob Rusk doesn't wear particularly bright ties. ?But AFTER we see him kill his first on-screen victim(Brenda Blaney, played by Barbara Leigh-Hunt), the next time we see Rusk sidle up alongside victim Babs -- his tie is big and bright and PURPLE, against an equally garish purple shirt -- Hitchcock is announcing Rusk as the Necktie Killer as surely as the Riddler's green attire is HIS uniform.

Also, each female victim gets a different necktie left around her neck as her "marker." Brenda Blaney ends up with a Scotch-patterned tan tie around her neck, Babs ends up with the purple tie we had seen for so long as Rusk walked along side of her. I can't remember the necktie "gift" round the final female victim's neck(she's already dead) nor the neckite around the opening corpse on the Thames. But its all very stylish in a dark way.

THEMES: I see the neckties left around the throats of the female victims as an announcement that a MAN has had his raging sexual vengeance against the feminine sex. Its a very MALE weapon and it is used to kill FEMALES.

There is also the theme of the serial killer as "a showboat." He WANTS to be known as the Necktie Killer. He WANTS that notoriety, as sure as Jack the Ripper wanted his.

(By the way, evidently DNA and cold cases being solved has "cut down" on the REAL serial killers nowadays. They fear somewhat immediate detection and capture. But even back in the less techological time of Frenzy, one wondered: might not fingerprints be left on the ties? Could not the ties be traced back to sales in London stores(unless Rusk bought out of the city perhaps in Kent, where he tells us his mother lives -- "the Garden of England," Rusk says.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (3683) 3 hours ago

So, anyway, Frenzy was a late comeback hit for many reasons in Hitchcock's career, but I surely think his instinctive decision on turning the strangler's weapon into a necktie illustrated so many ways in which Hitchocck created his own memorable world and memorable motifs within it. And as Hitchcock told an interviewer, "Once we get the script going, the themes rather fall into place." Like neckties as a male weapon against females.

---
---

12 years before Frenzy, Hitchocck had the more famous and blockbuster(and scream-worthy) Psycho, but there, too, he and his screenwriter Joe Stefano, "made the murder motif uniform," thus.

From Robert Bloch's novel, as "Mary Crane" sees a woman's head sticking through the shower curtain to stare at her(very scary on the page, not the shadowy figure of the movie at all-- because the killer's face didn't need to be hidden.)

"Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further, and a hand appeared. It was a hand holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

And her head."

Yikes. Hitchcock knew he wouldn't be cutting off Janet Leigh's head (and by the way, the novel points out that Mrs Bates slashed and stabbed the victim BEFORE the beheading.) But Hitchcock DID decide to go ahead and make that big "butcher's knife" the murder weapon for the shower scene. The year before in North by Northwest, commie henchman Valerian(Adam Williams) had thrown one SMALL knife into the back of the UN diplomat, kililng him instantly with one throw, and later used another SMALL knife to attack Cary Grant on Mount Rushmore(Valerian fails and Grant pushes him off the monument.) Some years earlier, an assssain had used a somewhat larger knife to stab a good guy spy in the back , but again -- smaller knife, just one blow necessary.

CONT

[–] roger1 (3683) 3 hours ago

No, the Psycho knife would be BIG, phallic, sharp and the stabs would be multiples, one after the other, "it seems to last forever" wrote Stephen King. Psycho had a number of horror elements, but perhaps the most terrifying was the size of that knife as wielded by that superstrong, superinsane harridan of an old woman.

Back to Robert Bloch's novel and the second murder, of the detective named Arbogast:

Unlike in the movie, where Arbogast just walks in through the front door and walks up the stairs to his death, in the book, Arbogast KNOCKS on the door, and Mrs Bates comes DOWN the stairs to greet him. She cries gaily "I'm coming! I'm coming! Just a moment!"
"And it WAS just a moment. Mother opened the door and Mr. Arbogast walked in. He looked at her and then he opened his mouth to say something. And as he did, he raised his head, and that was all Mother had been waiting for.
Her arm went out and something bright and glittering flashed back and forth, back and forth...It hurt Norman's eyes and he didn't want to look. He didn't have to look, either, because he already knew.

Mother had found his razor."

(I will note here that both the shower murder and the murder of the detective in Bloch's novel are horrifying in an entirely different, rather more sickening way than they became in the cinematic pyrotechnics of Hitchocck's movie.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (3683) 2 hours ago

Anyway, I picture Hitchocck and his screenwriter Joe Stefano in the office reaching Arbogast's murder and talking thus:

Hitchcock: Alright, so we have reached the murder of the detective.
Stefano: By a strait razor to the throat in the novel.
Hitchcock: Yes. I don't know. Slashing the throat is rather a bloody bit of business, cutting all the plumbing so to speak. What will our friends at the Hays office think of that?
Stefano: I think they might try to cut it out.
Hitchcock: Like the detective's throat?
Stefano: Ha. As I recall, the Mother slashed his throat so he couldn't scream because there were GUESTS down at the motel. An old couple.
Hitchcock: There will be no other guests at the Bates Motel in our story, ever.
Stefano: OK.
Hitchcock: Well, look , in our story, we've already seen the girl stabbed with a big butcher knife. We might as well strive for continuity. This will be about a killer who chooses to use only ONE weapon..the weapon that can be found in any woman's kitchen drawer. A butcher knife. Psycho will be about a butcher knife madman...er madwoman.
Stefano: OK. Now how do we hide the face of the killer this time, in the foyer?
Hitchocck: Well, there IS a staircase nearby. Let's send the detective UP that staircase and try to hide the Mother's face up there.

END

Who knows, really? But these changes MUST have been dicated in Hitchocck's script meetings with Joe Stefano(Psycho) and Anthony Shaffer(Frenzy) because if you know the movies you know Arbogast doesn't die by strait razor and the Frenzy killer uses neckties not his hands.

Its a nice little lesson in "how to understand what Hitchcock did even without Hitchocck there to tell you that he did it."

CONT

[–] roger1 (3683) 2 hours ago

PS. When Mother first raises her butcher knife in the shower scene in Hitchocck's movie, I've always felt that the knife was "doctored" to be less "censorable." In short, it isn't a very REAL knife, it isn't a very POINTED knife, and it isn't a very SHARP knife. The tip looks rather rounded -- which does make it "phallic" (and appropriately so, a MAN is committing this rape-like killing) but also makes it look rather "non-lethal." Who would want to get stabbed by a dull rounded knife?

Elsewhere the big knife is pretty terrifying. The way it flashes in the light as Mrs. Bates brings the knife down on Arbogast's face (the smaller knife in Varlian's hand flashed on Rushmore in North by Northwest, Hitchocck said in general "A knife without a flash of light is light asparagus without hollandaise sauce.") I also think the knife looks sharper as it comes down on Arbogast out of frame ...in the foyer.