Authors: Patrick McGilligan
During the first takes, Foster reacted to the trap by dropping his head guiltily. The director took him aside and recommended that he smile nervously instead: a Hitchcockian nuance. And Alec McCowen’s last line, after it is clear that the real killer finally has been caught—“Mr. Rusk, you’re not wearing your necktie!”—also got massaged by the master. During the first takes, McCowen snapped it out in terse tough-guy fashion. Hitchcock pulled him aside. “Alec, if I was playing your part… which I’m not… but if I was playing your part I wouldn’t say the line like that. It’s the end of the movie. You’ve got your man. There’s nothing else to worry about. If I was playing your part, I’d just lean against the door, and I’d sigh. … I might smile, even … and I’d say very quietly, ‘You’re not wearing your necktie …’ But it’s up to you—you’re playing the part.” One more time, and it was perfect.
The one character given short shrift in the scene, ironically, is Blaney, who, after having escaped a prison hospital, has just swung a crowbar against a sleeping form—startlingly revealed to be a fresh victim of Rusk’s. Jon Finch is least important in the triangulated final shot; perhaps, after all his character has been through, he too could have used a touch of pity.
In early June Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock had stolen a weekend in Scotland, where once again they found themselves dreaming forlornly of filming
Mary Rose.
When, after the first few weeks of shooting
Frenzy
, Hitchcock decided to assemble some footage and show it to a handful of privileged souls, he worried what Alma would think. He awaited her reaction “like a schoolboy,” recalled Barry Foster, “showing his homework to the teacher.”
Disaster struck shortly thereafter, when, on the eve of leaving for a vacation with her granddaughter, Mrs. Hitchcock suffered a paralyzing stroke. Fortunately Dr. Walter Flieg, in London throughout filming on
Frenzy
(though he didn’t advertise his presence), was able to assist her. Alma was flown to a Los Angeles hospital, and Hitchcock didn’t know
what to do; everyone told him there was nothing he could do. But he was frantic, distraught, and in the company of family or friends he overflowed with tears.
People wondered if he would make it through the film. But Hitchcock bucked up, as though it was more important than ever that he finish
Frenzy
, if only to please Alma. Still, the afternoons became endurance tests, with Hitchcock heading for his caravan by 4:30
P.M.
to watch on video the last take of the day. Afterward he invited the cameraman and assistant director to join him for another juice and vodka. They still had work to do breaking down the set, so they humored him, taking sips but leaving most of their drinks behind.
He even excused himself and stayed in his caravan for the scene where Rusk, crouched in the back of the truck carrying Babs’s body, has to break her fingers in order to dislodge her grip on his tiepin.
*
This scene, one of
Frenzy
’s most excruciating (and an uncomfortably funny moment), had been planned shot by shot and then carefully storyboarded—so much of it was easily delegated to the second unit while Hitchcock was dining in his caravan with two royal visitors, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier.
The nights were especially rough on Hitchcock as he waited for the regular reports from the States about Alma’s prognosis. Her left side was frozen, her speech and walking erratic. Again and again he inveigled the cameraman and assistant director back to Claridge’s so he wouldn’t have to sit alone in his suite, arranging an elaborate dinner that he only picked at, drinking steadily while talking morosely about the two things he loved most in the world: film and his adored Alma. Dinner was interrupted by transatlantic calls.
Although he could present an icy, forbidding facade, Hitchcock was “an incredibly friendly, nice man,” according to cameraman Taylor. He was also “incredibly generous” to the actors, Taylor noted, keeping certain ones on salary
after
their scenes in spite of pressure from the studio, saying, “The film is going to make $10 million, whether it’s liked or disliked, and we’ve only spent two and a half million, so what are they complaining about?”
**
After the principals were finished, the cameraman and a small crew were likewise kept on salary after their contracts ran out. Hitchcock had only one thing left to shoot: the trailer. He and Taylor went out for lunch
and dinner again and again, with the director musing endlessly about the best possible trailer (and racking up lavish mealtime expenses while the studio’s representatives fumed). After a while they got around to shooting a specially crafted dummy-Hitchcock for the trailer, which they shot floating on his back down the Thames. Then and only then did the director return to Hollywood.
Even before he returned. Alma was much improved, though she would suffer aftereffects, including the permanent paralysis of three fingers of her left hand (“in fact, I have to help ‘do her up’ every morning before I leave,” Hitchcock wrote to a friend).
A few interiors, retakes, the special effects, and other postproduction took six months. Then Hitchcock returned to London early in 1972 to oversee the final dubbing and scoring.
Henry Mancini was the first man engaged to compose the music for
Frenzy.
But Hitchcock was enigmatic with his instructions to Mancini, giving the most garlanded light composer in Hollywood a seeming free hand. So Mancini delivered what he thought Hitchcock wanted—brooding, Herrmannesque music. Hitchcock listened to a recording of the pieces, saying nothing, nodding appreciatively. “Finally, when he was alone in the dubbing room,” recalled Mancini, “he decided that it didn’t work. The reason he sent forth—I never talked to him, he sent word through someone—he said the score was macabre.”
The score was then reassigned to Ron Goodwin, a light composer from the British film industry. This time, Hitchcock articulated a comprehensive breakdown of his requisites. “Sparkling early-morning music for the opening—woodwinds and glockenspiel,” Goodwin remembered. “If Hitchcock hadn’t directed me, I would have written something with a macabre lilt to it. But he wanted no hint of the horror to come.” (“I wish I had something like that to go by,” said Mancini ruefully. “It might have been a different story.”)
As usual, the film’s visual crescendos involved meticulous planning—but also as usual, Hitchcock tinkered with them a fair amount during post-production. Two of the most famous sequences were laboriously crafted Hitchcockery; one was heavily indebted to Soviet editing philosophies, the other every bit as influenced by German expressionism.
The ex-wife’s rape and strangling was a truly disturbing scene, but like the shower-stabbing montage in
Psycho
it was also a magic act: quick cuts, body doubles (Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s breasts were disallowed by contract), extreme distorted angles, even freeze-frames to disguise the actress’s breathing. And after the “impotent frenzy of the killer and the hideous closeup of the strangling with a necktie,” in Anthony Shaffer’s words,
Hitchcock planned to conclude the montage with “a closeup of the dead woman’s tongue dripping saliva,” the decision that provoked the sharpest debate during postproduction.
Indeed, “Hitchcock filmed a pan down from her eyes to her tongue lolling out after she dies,” according to Bill Krohn, “using a 250 mm lens equipped with a diopter—a filter that enhances the camera’s ability to focus on tiny details—to show spittle collecting on her chin.”
Shaffer, Peggy Robertson, and Universal officials, already thrown by the unseemly film, united against the tongue-dripping close-up, and at the eleventh hour Hitchcock “yielded to pressure,” according to Shaffer. He took it out—but left it in for the British version, so his homeland’s more conservative censors could take it out. For wasn’t the chin spittle the last red herring of Hitchcock’s career, allowing the censors to pass everything else? And wasn’t that the idea—the decisively modern idea of
Frenzy
, which is indeed more lurid than any other Hitchcock film—that such a murder should be thoroughly explicit, thoroughly repulsive?
If the rape-strangling was bravura Russian-inspired editing (forty-three shots, according to Krohn’s tally, with each shot preordained on a numbered yellow file card), another high point of the film was the Murnau-inspired floating camera movement that escorts Rusk and Babs up the stairs to his second-floor flat. As though sensing what is about to happen, Hitchcock’s camera pauses outside the door; then, as they pass inside, it pulls back and glides away—a difficult, beautiful shot in those days—the sound track going silent as the camera descends the stairs alone.
Upstairs, behind closed doors, the murder takes place, but it is drowned out by the noise of the street welling up to blot out any struggle or scream.
*
The ex-wife’s rape and strangling was the most brutal scene in the director’s career, but Babs’s was Hitchcock at his most discreet. The former was the gaze of a voyeur, the latter of a man turning away in disgust.
By the New Year,
Frenzy
was beginning to shape up coherently, darker and more gripping than anything Hitchcock had accomplished since
The Birds.
After several failures in a row, even those close to him were surprised by its riveting quality. One day, Hitchcock ran the finished
Frenzy
in the office projection room solely for Mrs. Hitchcock and Norman Lloyd. He sat in his office down the hall, his hands clasped at his desk, stoically awaiting their verdict. Lloyd deliberately sat by himself up front, while Mrs. Hitchcock sat where she liked to watch, from a back row. By the time
Frenzy
was over, Lloyd had grown so excited that he
leaped up and shouted, “It’s the picture of a young man!” He glanced behind him and saw Mrs. Hitchcock weeping uncontrollably with pride in her husband.
Universal was at once proud and terrified—proud that it had such a sensational Hitchcock film to promote and distribute, but terrified that the nudity and violence might prove too much for provincial markets. The studio’s editor in chief, William Hornbeck, was called in to consult with Hitchcock, helping to parse the differing versions that varied country by country, and sometimes even state by state in the United States. This—like censorship and back projection—was another constant of his long career, a necessary compromise he hated, but stoically accepted.
Universal in 1972 might not have been up to Hitchcock’s standards in some categories, but its publicity department marched like Sherman’s army—and now was able to tout the greatest Hitchcock film in a decade. The studio could offer for dozens of interviews—in person or by phone—with the living legend himself, who, rested and ready after a quiet spring, signed on for a grueling press campaign.
Everyone figured
Frenzy
would be the last Hitchcock film, and so there was a last-hurrah quality to all the hoopla. The bandwagon started in May with Cannes, where the new film was shown out of competition. François Truffaut met with Hitchcock before the festival, and thought the director looked “aged, tired and tense, for he was always very emotional before introducing a new picture, very much like a young man about to take a school examination.” Hitchcock could be assured of appreciation from the French, however, and
Frenzy
was hailed in Cannes as a late-career masterpiece.
After staying overnight at the palace in Monaco, the Hitchcocks brought
Frenzy
to Paris for a screening, where Truffaut thought he looked “fifteen years younger” after the reception at Cannes. Now the director beamed with pleasure, admitting that he’d been scared beforehand.
Back in America by the first week of June, Hitchcock was interviewed by newspapers and magazines, and on radio and television. Still, though there are more on-the-record interviews with Hitchcock than with any other director of his generation, even his publicists said that after Truffaut’s book, he was rarely asked a truly searching question. The interviewers now were almost fawning, the questions often repetitive or stupid. Herb Steinberg, who attended to Hitchcock’s publicity at Paramount and Universal, recalled an eleven-city tour in the mid-1960s where in each city, a stream of journalists were ushered in to meet him all day long, bearing their tape recorders and cameras. “We played a game,” recalled Steinberg, “and kept score of how many people asked him the same dumb question about the project. He enjoyed that, but it also bored him.”
On the East Coast Hitchcock accepted a flurry of awards, including an
honorary doctor of humane letters at Columbia University. He attended press luncheons and wine tastings, and even cut cakes in the lobbies of newly built movie theaters that were opening up for business with
Frenzy.
Although the Atlantic tour touched down only in Boston and New York, back in California Universal took care of arranging even more in-person or phone appointments for regional media, as well as representatives of foreign markets.
Hitchcock hadn’t seen reviews this good for years; even skeptics were won back. Jay Cocks wrote in
Time
that “in case there was any doubt, back in the dim days of
Marnie
and
Topaz
, Hitchcock is still in fine form.
Frenzy
is the dazzling proof.” Richard Schickel said in
Life
that “Hitchcock superbly balances the ordinary and the extraordinary, thus reminding us how much he still deserves the name of master, and how well a master can entertain.” Vincent Canby wrote in the
New York Times
that the film represented “Hitchcock in the dazzling lucid form that is as much the meaning as the method of his films.”
With or without the spittle, the strangling scene was still shocking—“repulsive,” in the words of Spoto, “unworthy of the ordinary Hitchcock restraint and indirectness”—and caused a brouhaha in America. “Does ‘Frenzy’ Degrade Women?” read the headline of a Sunday piece in the
New York Times
, and letters to the editor poured in. The National Organization for Women gave the film a “Keep Her in Her Place” Award. But the controversy only seemed to fan the box office, where
Frenzy
performed remarkably well.