Frenzy
1972, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Fourteen minutes into Frenzy, while chatting with Richard Blaney on the sidewalk below, Bob Rusk calls his mother to the window. She pops her head out and exchanges greetings with Blaney. “Hello, Mrs. Rusk.” “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.” That’s all they say to each other, and most viewers will forget the old woman within seconds. Her appearance does nothing to advance the plot, yet she plays a key role in an elaborate inside joke between Alfred Hitchcock and anyone who has followed the thread of his career.
Frenzy is not quite Hitchcock’s last film. He made Family Plot four years later, but Frenzy is the last of the suspense movies he’s known for. It begins on a valedictory note of British orchestral pomp as a helicopter shot swoops down the Thames, and the Tower Bridge opens as if to welcome the director home after three decades in Hollywood. Just beyond the drawbridge, however, a tugboat trails black smoke across the river, quickly deflating any self-importance in the shot and hinting at the corruption to follow. The next shot echoes the hint of corruption, zeroing in on the brown water and eroded shoreline across from Westminster Palace while a self-congratulating lord speaks to a small crowd about the government’s efforts to clean up the river. Hitchcock then appears in his cameo, the only onlooker not applauding Sir George’s speech. Fixing pollution may be well and good, but a more insidious form of corruption will shortly upstage the speaker. A woman’s body floats by, strangled with a necktie, and the nobleman’s vanity slips out: “I say, that’s not my club tie, is it?”
Taking digs at Parliament, however, is not Hitchcock’s main concern. Since the 1930s his films have always looked at a psychological corruption that takes root even in ordinary people. Richard Blaney is not where Hitchcock will locate this rot, although the poor man will find himself under erroneous suspicion again and again, showing how easily society misjudges the source of its problems. Within his first minute he’s fired from a pub on a hasty charge of pinching liquor.
Here Blaney heads for Rusk’s place in Covent Garden, and the film begins all over again. Instead of the pompous shot of the Thames, the camera descends into the bustling produce market, and the music is more lyrical and human-scaled than before. This is Hitchcock’s true homecoming, not to the landmarks of the British Empire but to an ordinary working street like the East End greengrocer’s where he grew up. As commonplace as it is, the market is shot lovingly, and we should not read any snobbery into the fact that it’s also the location of corruption. Hitchcock invariably places full responsibility – the credit, the blame, and the hope – for society’s outcomes on ordinary people like Richard and Brenda Blaney, Babs Milligan, and Bob Rusk.
Hitchcock’s social analysis is always paired, as serious students of his films will recognize, with psychoanalysis. Frenzy is too late in Hitchcock’s career for him to spell out his argument all over again, as he had done in Vertigo and been roundly ignored. Here he leaves just enough signs to confirm his longstanding belief that society’s dysfunction – particularly the disproportionate share of problems caused by the male sex – is rooted mainly in the passions and rivalries that Freud and many others have described in juvenile sexuality. In short, like Scottie “You’re a big boy now” Ferguson in Vertigo, Bob Rusk is a child in a man’s body.
Right before Rusk shows off his mother, Blaney overhears a doctor in a pub offering his assessment of the necktie murderer. Such criminals, he says, appear on the surface “as ordinary, likable, adult fellows, but emotionally they remain as dangerous children.” The operative words here are “adult” and “children”. Later, in Brenda’s matchmaking bureau, we find that Rusk has chosen for himself the alias “Robinson”. Hitchcock had used that alias once before, in Stage Fright, also for an oedipal villain. The “-son” in the name is a symbolic reminder that the man still thinks of himself as a child, still locked in a mother-son relationship. In Vertigo too, Scottie’s name ends in “-son”. Rusk’s mother makes a second appearance toward the end, her portrait framed on the mantel right next to Rusk’s bed, the insinuation even more subtle than in Strangers on a Train when the patently oedipal villain symbolically occupies his father’s bed.
It’s slightly odd, in a film with so many busy street scenes, that there are almost no children, even among the extras. There are a couple of kids in the Coburg Hotel lobby, but almost everything in Frenzy belongs to an exclusively adult world: the political speech, the produce market, the bars, the marriage bureau, the courtroom, the prison. The film itself, with its graphic violence, is distinctly made for adults. All of this offsets Rusk’s childlike nature. It’s not that he’s endearing like a child, although he can be charming. Rather we’re meant to see that he’s never grown out of a child’s more harmful traits – selfishness, lack of impulse control, treatment of others as means to an end. The first we hear of his mother is when he gives Blaney a box of grapes. “Here ya are, take one of these back to your girlfriend Babs. Get her to peel you one. ‘Beulah, peel me a grape.’ That’s what my ol’ mum used to say when I was a kid.” Evidently his mother taught him a sense of entitlement, that he should expect women to cater to him.
The women in Frenzy do in fact cater to men, and there’s a distinct pattern in the difference between the sexes. Women seem to spend their lives giving food and drink – Brenda buys Richard dinner; Babs, the pub bartender, and the waitress at Brenda’s club are all women; and Inspector Oxford’s wife is forever cooking up exotic French meals for him. Men, in turn, seem to spend their lives cleaning up messes they or other men have made – the government official cleaning up the river; the hotel porter taking Blaney’s smelly clothes; Rusk brushing potato dust off his suit; the inspector solving the crime; and Brenda’s customer whose fiancée expects him to clean up the house every morning. The two chief exceptions to this pattern are Rusk, who sells fruit, though we never see him doing so; and Blaney, who tends bar but gets fired right off. The overall picture is of a society where women, on balance, are more productive than men, and if we follow Hitchcock’s logic it’s because they’re more grown up.
The ideal of maturity in Hitchcock’s films, in Frenzy as much as ever, is marriage. Rear Window, for instance, is a story of a childish man overcoming his resistance to marriage, and many of the director’s villains are enemies of marriage, like the widow-seducing killer in Shadow of a Doubt. Bob Rusk fits the mold once again, profaning the sacred bond when he enters the bureau of “Friendship & Marriage” to rape and kill its proprietress.
For all his imperfections, Richard Blaney represents a man making an honest attempt to live as a grown-up. He was a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, but his life has been cruelly reduced to the edge of helplessness. He’s fired for sipping liquor, as if society won’t let him be an adult, and at the hotel he’s put in the Cupid Room, symbolically infantilizing him. Again and again he finds himself on the wrong side of authority, whether working for Forsythe or subject to a manhunt, like a child living under constant threat of discipline. He was married once, and though he failed at it, he had graciously sacrificed his reputation by allowing the court to grant Brenda a quick divorce on fictional grounds of extreme cruelty.
Consistent with all this, Blaney is introduced, immediately after the necktie murderer’s victim in the Thames, putting on a tie. The very item of clothing that first casts suspicion on him is also a symbol of adulthood. Children rarely wear neckties – and here we have the missing piece of Hitchcock’s grand inside joke. At the end of Frenzy, Blaney is caught in the most compromised position imaginable. He’s just bashed a woman’s head in with a tire iron and lifted the blanket to find Rusk’s latest victim, when Inspector Oxford walks in the door. Luckily the detective understands what really happened, and when Rusk follows moments later, Oxford addresses the actual murderer: “Mr. Rusk. You’re not wearing your tie.” Anyone who fully appreciates Hitchcock can read the double meaning in this. The absence of a necktie equates the killer with the little boy that he still is.
CONNECTIONS:
Saboteur – Black smoke crosses the screen near the beginning to signify corruption
Stage Fright – Alias of “Robinson” used to connote a murderer’s oedipal mindset
Strangers on a Train – Insinuation of an oedipal relationship when the villain is in or near a bed
Vertigo – Suffix of “-son” hints at an oedipal case by highlighting the character’s dominant relation
The Quiller Memorandum – London landmarks shot off-kilter or with other hints of corruption; frequent use of food