At the age of seventy-two, Sir Alfred Hitchcock released his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), at the beginning of the era of the permissive cinema. In the former decade, the Hays code had finally been abolished and sex and violence in film were now rated by the MPAA board. During this changeover, Hitchcock was making Topaz (1969), an espionage/spy picture that had no call for the possibilities of the new rules of the American Motion Picture board. For his next picture, Hitchcock found a novel, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, that appealed to the themes of secret guilt and the wronged innocent man that he had been making into films for years. And while in the past, for pictures like The Lodger (1927), Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1964), he had to hide or imply the violence and sex, Frenzy would finally allow Hitchcock to shoot a picture with all the sex and violence he wanted. When we consider the first scene of violence, the murder of Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) by Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), we may wonder if Hitchcock may have gone too far in what can only be described as a modern remake of The Lodger.
For the first twenty-five minutes of the picture, we are told that a maniac has been raping and strangling women with neckties. We are immediately introduced to a man who could be the murderer. Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) is an unpleasant man with a hot temper (the only thing that keeps us on Blaney’s side during his introduction is that he is fired from his job by a man who is even more unpleasant than Blaney is) who values his friends but treats everyone else with thinly-veiled disdain. With no money in his pocket, he goes to see his ex-wife Brenda, who runs a successful marriage and friendship agency. Though he picks a fight with her, she takes him out to dinner where we see his temper flare again and we feel not just worry but concern for Brenda who refuses to sever ties with this possibly dangerous man. While we have Brenda’s word that Richard was never violent towards her, we never feel completely comfortable when in the presence of Richard Blaney. It is at this moment, twenty-five minutes into the film, that Hitchcock shows us his hand and reveals to us the identity of the necktie murderer.
The day after Richard and Brenda’s dinner date, we see Brenda again in her office, applying the face powder that will incriminate Richard of her murder. A strange sound, that of her office door opening when there should be no one in the office, gets her immediate attention. Standing with his back to her closed door is Rusk. He greets her and she responds, “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Robinson.” Never has Hitchcock used the cinema to convey so much as in this moment. In ten seconds, consisting of two glances and two lines, Hitchcock has told us who the murderer is. This is the first sequence (excepting the prologue where the existence of the murderer is introduced before we meet Blaney) that exists independent of Blaney. We have been following Blaney about and think that we will discover more about the murderer by sticking with him. Since the sequence before showed Blaney discovering the money that Brenda slipped into his coat pocket, we are expecting only him to enter Brenda’s office in the next scene when we hear her door open, either to thank her for the money or to berate her for insulting him with the gift. When Rusk enters, we realize that what is about to happen occurs independently of Blaney. We have been cast adrift by now being forced to watch two characters whom we both don’t know very well and were unaware knew each other (In Blaney’s earlier conversation with Brenda, he says Rusk’s name as “One Bob Rusk,” conveying that Brenda and Rusk should not know each other). Hitchcock made a wise decision in having little-known actors portray his leads so that we could not guess the importance of the character too early in the film. When we first meet Bob Rusk, he is just one of the many people who crosses Blaney’s path. We have also met up with a politician, a pub manager, two businessmen and two barmaids, some of whom are important to the story while other have simply passed off information and disappeared. Bob Rusk may have struck us as a bit crude and flippant, but he seemed much finer company than Blaney. But now we see him close the door behind him quickly and press his back against it, as if he expected Brenda to go running for the door the second she sees him. He looks at her in a childish manner; a little boy who knows that he has done something naughty or, worse still, knows he is about to do something naughty. We distrust that look immediately. As if to quell all doubts about how this situation will continue, Brenda addresses Rusk as “Mr. Robinson,” which we know is a false name. This can be no mistake. Rusk has not chosen to visit a nameless woman with a false name. He knows who Brenda is. He earlier made a reference to her in his conversation with Blaney, saying, “Why not look up your ex? She’s doing alright, isn’t she?” Brenda’s married name, Blaney, appears on the door to her office as well. We know that this is a film about a man who rapes and kills women and now there can be no doubt: Brenda is in danger. What makes this scene even more disgusting is that it is not a random act of violence. Rusk chose Brenda because of her marriage to Blaney. He put the idea of Blaney going to see Brenda in the desperate man’s head, knowing that some witness would probably note Blaney’s violent tendencies. The stink of premeditation is stifling.
At this moment, the music that has carried us from the previous scene stops and will not intrude again until after the murder. Hitchcock will shoot his buildup and murder sequence without music, as he planned to do in Psycho and finally did in The Birds. Hitchcock probably saw the intrusion of music upon his murder to be distracting to the action, and since the murder will be far removed from traditional style (both Hollywood’s and Hitchcock’s) the scene survives and does well without the accompaniment. As the scene continues, the lack of music and the incredibly bare look of Brenda’s office help fuel the scene for suspense, even for those who have not yet guessed who the murderer is.
During their conversation, Rusk paces back and forth across the office, smiling his wicked smile and playing with Brenda’s files, showing us that her ideas of proper conduct mean nothing to him. When Hitchcock cuts back to Brenda, we see her as if from Rusk’s point of view, slightly from above and moving past her but always keeping her within the center of frame. She is always in his eye, and his pacing back and forth resembles that of a tiger stalking his prey. This view is, of course, not given to Brenda, as she is the subject. To her, Rusk could resemble Blaney, who paced the very same way through her office the day before, and she handled that situation from her desk very well. We are given the privileged information that Brenda is out of her league, that her danger is real, and that it is only a manner of time before the tiger pounces.
Rusk has ostensibly come to see her about her failure to match him up with a woman, and we learn from Brenda of Rusk’s “peculiarities”. Rusk is a sadist who needs a woman who will submit to him. When Brenda confronts Rusk with this information, Rusk sits down in the chair near the window (which will soon be Brenda’s death bed) and, for the only time during the entire encounter, looks bothered and weak in both our and Brenda’s eyes. Brenda’s tone towards Rusk may be condescending (as any decent woman’s would be) but there is no reason to seriously believe that Brenda’s attitude towards Rusk causes him to lash out at her. As has already been seen in the opening shot of the sequence, Brenda’s murder has been premeditated. His jabber about being unsatisfied with Brenda’s failure to find him a wife is only a ploy to get him into the office. It is possible that Rusk has been “elsewhere”, as he says later in the scene, and originally came to Brenda’s office to seriously consider finding a wife (a prospect he could not hope to achieve considering the failure of every other agency he had visited), but Rusk’s serious tone about this insane project only shows how well he can deceive himself. He has lied to himself about the chances of his finding a woman through an agency, about his reasons for going to Brenda’s office that morning, and that his rape of her will leave him satisfied as the others have not. He continually believes that he will not have to kill her, that his impotence will be overcome. He does not recognize that his orgasm is contingent with Brenda’s strangling.
Rusk is visibly upset when confronted by his own sexuality and springs back to life, saying, “I don’t think you’re really trying your best.” (This just after Brenda says she would like to get back to her interrupted lunch. Rusk, still the stalking tiger, sees Brenda as his own lunch and lunchtime is quickly approaching.) Rusk approaches her desk menacingly, listing his good points (“I like flowers…fruit…people like me…”). Although this sounds like a sincere plea for Rusk to be understood for who he is – a man who certainly did not choose to be the monster that he is – Hitchcock cuts to Brenda when Rusk says the word “fruit”. Rusk, despite any good aspects to his character that exists within him, can not help seeing Brenda as something to be consumed. She is dressed in green, like a grape, and we remember how harshly Blaney treated his grapes earlier in the picture (and how harshly we reacted to it). Blaney’s strangulation of the grapes foreshadowed Rusk’s strangulation of Brenda. It is interesting that Hitchcock decided to use Rusk’s profession to continually push the images of fruit rather than other foods (although we see other foods, particularly potatoes, fruit is in the foreground of the picture). Fruit, like the human body, is made up mostly of water. It is the vitality of fruit that humans crave when they eat it. In this respect, Brenda’s vitality is sapped by Rusk.
Brenda tells Rusk to go elsewhere to find his type of women (unlike Rusk and Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen), who refers to the killer’s bloodlust as a whetted appetite, Brenda never confuses women as food) and Rusk admits that he returned to Brenda’s agency because of his attraction to her. “I like you,” he says simply, and Brenda, who a moment before exhibited only disgust for Rusk’s peculiarities, now looks up at him with trepidation. She realizes the connotations of those simple words and, for the first time, she senses her own danger. He concludes by saying that Brenda is “my type of woman” and Brenda, knowing what type of woman Rusk is after, is horrified. Rusk never actually explains in his own words what his type of woman is, but we can only assume that he uses this reasoning to remove the blame of the murders from himself. If Rusk wants women who want to be raped, then he assumes that any woman who catches his eye, who teases him with their availability, is of this type. Rusk sees all women as teasers who rebuff him while offering themselves up to him. Rusk claims no responsibility for raping these women who have teased him, no responsibility in his own impotence (he clearly blames Brenda later), and no responsibility for their eventual murder (Rusk later says to Blaney, “Mind you, some women deserve everything they get.”). Rusk again refers to her as a piece of fruit (“Never squeeze the goods until they’re yours. Now, I would never do that.”) and Brenda’s reaction is to make a phone call, presumably to the police, which is thwarted. Rusk suddenly changes the subject, trying to lighten the suddenly serious air of the situation, by referring to Brenda’s lunch (“English?” he presumably asks of her apple before taking a bite, although he could be referring to the much more opulent piece of fruit sitting before him). By taking a bite of her apple, he makes a liar of himself when he said that he would never squeeze the goods until they were his. The apple is not literally his, he simply helps himself to it, but his sudden hold of the situation makes the apple his simply through the act of claiming it. Where once the situation belonged to Brenda as she chastised Rusk for his sexual practices, now Rusk is in charge. He takes the apple because it now, in this sense, belongs to him. He will soon claim Brenda as his, and take her in a similar way.
Rusk describes Brenda’s lunch as “frugal and mean”, a description which would fit Brenda’s office as well, and may be a subtle hint to Rusk’s true feelings about women in general and Brenda in particular (Whatever his feelings about Brenda, he will soon conclude that women are “all the same” and shall treat Brenda as he has treated others). He becomes even more forward by describing Brenda’s figure as “opulent” (“ripe” would have been a better word as Brenda is ready for plucking). Brenda smiles and claims her figure is too opulent as she tries to humor this dangerous man who is suddenly asking her out to lunch. Brenda doesn’t realize that this is to be a lunch where she will be offered up as the main course. In order to placate him, (and to buy herself some time) she agrees to the date. Hitchcock here pulls a fast one on his audience. We have been prepared for the tiger to pounce on his prey and the suspense has been excruciating. When Brenda accepts Rusk’s offer, Rusk looks genuinely happy; his threatening mask has fallen. For a moment, both we and Brenda believe that the danger has passed. Brenda rises to get herself ready (to wash her hands, she says, but she’ll probably beat a quick retreat) and both she and we are taken completely by surprise when Rusk, the stalking tiger, finally pounces towards Brenda and pins her to the wall.
Through the window, we can see only the brick wall of the building next door, and Brenda’s trapped situation is assured. She makes the first of many offers to comply with Rusk’s wishes, which he refuses; her offer to go back to her place is rebuffed with Rusk’s claim, “This is your place.” Taking Brenda in her office, where she can usually assert power as a businesswoman, is a special privilege for Rusk. Instead of a grown woman, she has become a “wicked girl who tells wicked lies” and he stretches her across the chair. Hitchcock follows Brenda’s flowing decent onto the chair until her face is upside in closeup. Like his use of shadows creating a mustache on Crewe’s (Cyril Ritchard) face in Blackmail (1929), which said goodbye to silent villains, I believe that Hitchcock uses this shot to say goodbye to the old method of filmmaking. In the old days, a shot like this would be the climax of a rape scene, allowing a fadeout to convey the violence to come (a shot similar to this was used to convey a rape in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)). But instead of fading to black, the screen cuts to Rusk’s sweaty, ugly face in a huge closeup; the closest we’ve seen him in the film so far. The ugliness hasn’t gone away. Hitchcock is shoving it in our faces.
Brenda kicks Rusk away and makes for the door, but Rusk grabs her ankle and sends her tumbling to the floor, a moment that is not only violent but sexual because Rusk (and we) can briefly see up Brenda’s dress as she hits the floor. When Rusk drags her back to the chair, she offers him her money so that he may go and buy any woman he wants. But he wants her. Even the ringing telephone is no help and Brenda realizes that there is no way out of this horrible situation. Hitchcock cuts to Brenda’s legs reaching out and intertwined with Rusk’s legs, thus echoing his disturbing image of Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) and Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) as he is about to throw her off the train in Shadow Of A Doubt. In a Godlike overhead shot, she offers not to struggle and to take off her dress, but Rusk, obviously following a script in his own head, professes his wish for Brenda to struggle and peels her dress off himself. This again refers to Rusk’s attitude towards Brenda being a piece of fruit to be consumed and also recalls Rusk’s earlier statement, “Peel me a grape, Beulah”, which he attributed to his mother. Although we have no idea what went on between Rusk and his mother during his childhood (and indeed what might still be happening today), Rusk clearly implicates his mother in what he has become.
With a clawing motion (“We scratch and claw at each other,” said Norman Bates) he pulls down her stocking. In a closeup, Rusk looks dazed as he looks in Brenda’s direction and says, “Lovely” very softly. I can only assume that Rusk has looked at her sex and made a judgment on it. It is a crippling moment for both of them: she that she should be judged by him, he that he finds her sex lovely but knows deep down that he will not be able sexually conquer it. In response to Rusk’s judgment, Brenda, in closeup, looks away from her horror and frighteningly recites a psalm. A cross can clearly be seen dangling around her neck. Hitchcock is making a two-fold statement about religion with this moment. Brenda has decided to withdraw and gather up her strength to later deal with her own rape. She has stopped struggling and her prayer is clearly in conflict with Rusk’s increasingly violent utterances of the word “lovely” as he tries to overcome his impotence. Hitchcock cuts back to Brenda’s exposed breast as she covers it back up. It is a moment of silent strength, a personal victory, that Brenda’s faith has allowed her to achieve. Rusk, feeling himself failing, does not try expose her breast a second time. This personal victory over Rusk will unfortunately mean nothing when Brenda, faced with her own death, will find her final prayer unanswered.
At the height of the rape, Hitchcock cuts to a new angle of Brenda’s closeup, her features tired and askew. She turns her head slightly and looks straight into the camera, presumably at Rusk but also at us. Hitchcock has put us in Rusk’s place; we rape Brenda with our gaze of her. Her look is one of pity. We are all apart of this shameful creature for embarking on the ride this far. Even if we have not been supporting Rusk in his endeavors, Hitchcock forces us into his position. We are guilty by the very aspect of gazing, as is Hitchcock by his own (the camera’s) gaze. As punishment, we are put immediately into Brenda’s position; Rusk is now leaning forward onto us. Realizing that he has failed once again, he angrily sits up, momentarily putting his hands around Brenda’s throat and shouting, “Bitch! Women…you’re all the same! Well, I’ll show you.” Rusk clearly blames Brenda for his failure, and not just because her psalm put him off his rhythm. She is a tease who did not live up to her part of the seduction. That Rusk decides not to strangle Brenda with his bare hands and instead use his tie is an assertion of his manhood. A quiet moment passes between them as Brenda wonders what is going to happen next. Rusk removes his tie pin and starts to remove his tie. The shock of recognition passes into Brenda’s face as she realizes that her death is near. This has gone much farther than even she could have imagined. “My God, the tie.” she whispers before screaming. If this film is a conscious remake of The Lodger, than this scream links us back to the opening moment of that film. Both Brenda and the nameless victim from The Lodger scream at a horror off camera (both face the same direction and are nearly the same size in frame). One of the two differences is that the nameless victim screams at a horror that we have not been introduced to, while we know exactly what is to become of Brenda. The other difference is that the nameless victim’s scream is silent. Brenda’s scream is an eardrum-breaking shriek.
Rusk wraps the tie around Brenda’s neck in a two shot: it is the furthest that Hitchcock will allow us to get during the murder. Hitchcock alternates between closeups of Rusk straining to tighten the tie and Brenda struggling to breathe. We are placed in both positions of murderer and victim. Hitchcock uses this method of duel identification in a way that throws the audience off guard. Brenda prays for her life (“Jesus, help me. Help ME!”) but this prayer goes unanswered. Intercut with Rusk’s straining face are closeups of Brenda’s hands on Rusk’s, trying to loosen his grip while in the foreground the tie begins to disappear into the folds of skin. We can practically feel that tie around our necks. Brenda finally struggles the way Rusk wanted her to struggle during the rape; the closeups of her shaking head intercut with his face serve to heighten his sexual excitement. In closeup, Brenda begins to feel the life draining away from her and Hitchcock cuts to an extreme closeup of her fingers slipping down her bound neck, a shot reminiscent of Marion’s reaching fingers sliding down the tiled shower wall in Psycho. Rusk continues, and we are treated to an extreme closeup of Brenda’s eyes, the light fading from them fast, before he freezes the frame at her last gasp. It is during this shot, presumably, that Brenda’s tongue protrudes from her mouth. We know that Hitchcock is hiding something from us, a final detail that will put an exclamation point on the whole ordeal. We don’t get it until Rusk, exhausted and sexually spent, stands and begins to straighten himself out. Only then does Hitchcock cut to a medium closeup of Brenda, strangled with her tongue sticking out.
The moment is punctuated by a chord of music, the first instance of music in the sequence since the opening shot, and the punctuation of the chord is enough to make first-time audiences jump out of their seats. This shot of Brenda is so disgusting that it almost becomes funny if you look at it long enough, and Hitchcock probably decided to let the music intrude at this point to remind the audience that this is not a laughable moment (“We’re not comedians,” one can almost hear him say, thinking of the British terrorist in the aquarium scene of Sabotage (1936)). The shock forces us to look at Brenda, her vitality spent and wasted, no better than the crushed grapes Blaney had tread upon earlier. Although her breast remains covered and she has been spared the indignity of dying like a whore in the street, it is a false pride that only a corpse could take heart in. Furthermore, her protruding tongue takes whatever dignity her body mustered up away at the point of death. The shell of Brenda’s lifeforce and vitality is no longer eye-pleasing; it is no more than garbage. Like a piece of fruit, she has been consumed. When Hitchcock cuts back to Rusk, his activities include the picking of his teeth with his tiepin. He has just finished his lunch.
But unlike fruit, her vitality has not gone into the consumer, making him stronger. When Hitchcock cuts back to Rusk, he is completely spent. Rusk has not been satisfied with Brenda’s murder because it was not actually a rape. If Brenda’s strangling has any sexual connotations at all, it is a massive act of masturbation: an unfulfilling act of sexual aggression that usually leads the perpetrator weak and unsatisfied. To prove that his insatiable lust has not been quenched – that his “appetite” (to use Oxford’s terminology) has not been satisfied – Rusk commits two final violations against the corpse of Brenda. He steals the money out of her purse, a completely contemptible act considering he refused the money to begin with, and he takes her apple to nourish himself with. Since these last two acts of violation are not against the vital Brenda but instead against her wasted corpse, there is a hint of a necrophiliac thrill experienced by Rusk before he leaves the office.
In one, ten minute sequence, Hitchcock served up a good chunk of suspense followed by a horribly gruesome murder. Also, with the help of the new era of the permissive cinema, Hitchcock felt free to wallow in the issues of the mystery of sex that he had only hinted at in his previous films. The effeminate Lodger of 1927, whose murderous and sexual impulses were tempered by a studio-imposed ending, has transformed into the downright impotent Bob Rusk, whose sexual excitement at Brenda’s ugly murder reveals perversions buried deep in Rusk’s psyche. Hitchcock has taken us on a ride with a guilty man; he has made himself guilty by the implication of his camera’s gaze and ourselves guilty by the implication of our own fascinated gaze. Frenzy was Hitchcock’s last foray into hard-core thrillers: his final film, The Family Plot (1976), was a soft thriller with stretches of screwball comedy that was enjoyable, sometimes suspenseful, but only scratched the surface of a warped personality (the question of what type of forces could have drove Eddie Shoebridge (William Devane) to burn his adoptive parents to death would have made a fascinating film, but Hitchcock only gives us the actions and not the background of his final screen villain). Frenzy showed the world the face of perversion. The face looks familiar. It is the face of a seventy-two year old man struggling with his own demons at the end of his brilliant career and lonely life. It is the face of Hitchcock. It is also the face we see in the mirror every day. It is our face.
Did Hitchcock go too far? In these enlightened days, it’s difficult to say.
