Lovely

With Frenzy from 1972 Alfred Hitchcock is pitch-perfect in realizing his own vision and sharing it with the viewer.

There’s a serial killer working the streets in London raping and strangling women with a neck tie, the last of which is discovered floating in the Thames. Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) a disillusioned former Royal Air Force officer working as a bartender has just been fired for drinking on the job and is seeking career-direction with his bar-maid girlfriend Babs Milligan (Anna Massey). As Blaney hits the streets in search of another job he wanders to the Public Market to chat with a local fruit dealer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), to figure out what he will do. The police are clueless to the culprit in the ongoing crime and working on a solution casually speaking with Rusk whose sarcasm offsets the serious tone of the authorities. After having too many glasses of Brandy, Blaney goes to see his ex-wife Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) whose matrimonial agency is moderately successful putting people together. Brenda takes Blaney to dinner and surreptitiously puts money in his pockets which he discovers as he is sleeping the night at the local Salvation Army. When Brenda is raped and strangled by the necktie murderer the police suspect Blaney and a manhunt led by Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McGowan) is initiated for him. Inspector Oxford seems to be experiencing his own form of gastronomical torture in his marriage with a wife experimenting in ‘gourmet cooking’ by using her husband a test subject. As the net tightens and the police eventually capture Blaney, suspicions arise in Oxford’s mind about the possible true culprit.

It’s all too clear that the running story of Oxford and his cooking wife Mrs. Oxford (Vivien Merchant) is Hitchcock’s way of saying that the audience may not be altogether ready for the lurid tastes of this different kind of film. The director had established himself with thrillers with The Lodger from as early as 1926 but had developed his own cinematic lexicon by showing the interior psychology of his characters while simultaneously requiring that the viewer become vicariously implicated.

One of the scenes that’s sets this film apart is the early one in which we learn the identity of the killer and also are party to one of his acts. Economically done, it establishes many of the forces that have led to this moment in the film and continue to drive the story. We hear the killer tell the woman he is about to kill what he wants, and during a moment of actual playful flirting we begin to sense, as the woman in the scene does, that the man is dangerous. The next few moments are filled with desperation from both parties as the woman asks that she may be able to take her dress off so the man will not tear it when he rapes her, and the man telling her he wants her to struggle. As the scene climaxes the killer, during his violation intones the words “Lovely” as he fixates on the partially naked female figure beneath him, and the woman blankly repeats some memorized prayers half-aloud as self-comfort.

If that weren’t enough Hitchcock caps off the scene with the man leaning back afterwards and snapping at the woman as he pulls off his neck tie. It is at this moment that the woman and the viewer realize that this simple rapist is driven by homicidal forces and she is to become the next necktie murder victim.

This scene implicates the viewer in particular ways one of which is in the figuring of the actress under what film theorist Laura Mulvey refers to as the male gaze, an objectifying of the female figure in cinematic ways that is particularly a male-dominated vision.

The way that this happens is, firstly, we are introduced to the killer early in the film as someone the leading male character Richard Blaney trusts and confides in, and this character also appears to be a friend to Blaney, and offers to lend him money because he is out of work- the viewer trusts this man as much as Blaney does. Secondly we are shown the actress who gets killed in scenes where she is less than forceful, almost motherly in her relationship to men in her life, and in the rape scene she is also stripped to the waist by the killer with Hitchcock’s camera lingering on her naked breast as the man is shown with all his cloths on.

Hitchcock stacks the deck to manipulate the viewer into feeling more powerful than the woman in the scene in additional ways by having the man sincerely appear to court the woman. He asks her to have lunch with him and pleads with her to find him someone he can relate to. This allows the viewer to side with him before they understand his ultimate intentions.

Hitchcock had used this same technique in Psycho as when the killer stabs Janet Leigh in the shower, and Norman Bates runs in moments later to see what has happened, with an authentic look of shock on his face. This duality of character in Frenzy is developed in a more integrated way by having the killer function as a part of the on-going culture of London, a guy who could be our next-door neighbor.

There’s plenty of morbid humor in the film as well as when two gents in a pub make a joke to the bar maid that the necktie murderer’s raping of his victims is a ‘silver lining’ to what is an otherwise horrible situation. Hitchcock also adds some visual ghoulish humor using dead bodies when the murderer pursues a potato sack containing a dead body, and during an act of retrieving a damning clue, gains the sympathies of the viewer because we have been allowed to experience his actions in humorous ways which distances us from them.

Aside from the fact that Alfred Hitchcock had a few unsuccessful films preceding this one, Frenzy is a culmination of the filmmakers’ favorite elements of obsessive behavior, murder, a wrongly-accused man, and black sense of humor.

There are some fine nuances like the way a character works a bit of apple out of a space in his teeth, telegraphing to the audience a gesture that he will repeat in the film after a murder. And there is also the little detail of a piece of jewelry that the murderer has a habitual fondness for to pick his teeth. It’s one of those things that filmmakers love and one of the basics to building a character that crystallizes in the viewers’ mind.

There is a host of dark humorous lines from the film as when the hotel attendant realizes he has Blaney upstairs with Babs in the matrimonial suite and the police are seeking the man for murdering women. He states all too sincerely: “You know… sometimes just thinking about the lusts of men makes me want to heave”. We can’t help but smile at the attitude of this simpleton.

There is also the great line that pops up time and again from the killer we are introduced to early in the film as when he is in the process of nailing another one: “You’re my type of woman”.

The poor police inspector Oxford who is physically starved at home has his wife to help him talk through the details of the case but the lack or real food keeps him focused on the case instead of filling his stomach. It leaves us wondering the validity of the police and their investigations considering the depth of the wife’s consultation.

The police are figuring it all out and track down the murderer at the same time as Blaney does and the ultimate payoff is seeing who gets to the killer first. The culminating finish to this very droll English crime story is when the three lead males all find themselves in the killers’ apartment as the culprit stands there with a trunk in which to place his latest victim. It is just the sort of ending we have come to expect from Alfred Hitchcock, resolved but with a rye sense of humor as Chief Inspector Oxford looks at the killer and says: “You’re not wearing your tie”.

The DVD is the Widescreen version showing the great detail Hitchcock intended. There is also a featurette called The Story of Frenzy, background on how the director got this picture made with a budget under 2 Million Dollars. I found a copy at Half.com for $9.49.