FRENZY (70)

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock (1972)

Starring: Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Alec McCowen, Billie Whitelaw

The Pitch: An ex-soldier on the skids is accused of being the "necktie killer", a psychotic sex-murderer who's terrorising London.

Theo Sez: "An unpleasant experience" was my verdict after first viewing, more than ten years ago, and that's not entirely unjustified : there's no-one to root for (the nominal hero is a belligerent boor with a nasty temper) and the whole thing is decidedly misogynist, featuring Whitelaw as a particularly vicious harpy (a bizarrely gratuitous supporting role, full of hatred yet irrelevant to the plot per se) plus, about halfway through, one of the most unbearably protracted rape scenes in movie history. It's as though Hitchcock's sadism, always lurking beneath the surface of his movies, had been finally allowed to break free in the no-taboo 70s - and it's not a pretty sight. It is however part of what makes the film so fascinating, along with its unusual structure - following three separate characters (the cop, the killer and our falsely-accused hero) who meet only tangentially until the climax - and of course the sheer oddness of its tone, full of detours and apparent lapses : the impression it gives is of a nasty old joker indulging himself, having too much fun to observe the usual niceties. Black comedy is invariably preferred to conventional excitements, and style more important than exposition : the pacing is often geriatric, scenes so stiff they positively creak, yet there are moments of pure cinema - the (presumably) handheld pull-back away from the killer's front door, behind which a woman is being murdered, down a flight of stairs and out of the house (a Steadicam shot before Steadicam), or the audacity of fading out all the street-sounds as our heroine stands undecided, so the killer's velvety voice can emerge from the silence ("Got anywhere to go?"). Stylish, bold, tasteless, sadistic and darkly comic : looks like the Fat Man would've been right at home in the Age of Tarantino.