All these years later, "Frenzy" doesn't get mentioned up there with "Psycho" and "Vertigo," but in 1972, if you were a young Hitchcock fan(based on the recent showings of Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window and The Birds on TV)..."Frenzy" was a miracle.
For indeed the word was, after Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz -- and the long years between them -- that Hitchcock would never really make a good film, let alone a great film, again.
I practically had a fan's tears in my eyes when I read this review (paraphrased) from Newsweek magazine:
"It seemed that Hitchcock was in an irreverisble decline advanced by age. But as usual, the Old Master has fooled us. Frenzy is one of his very best."
Most(though not all) of the reviews had titles like : "Return of Alfred the Great"(Life), Still the Master(Time), Return of the Master(Newsweek), and, in retrospect, there is some belief that New Hollyhwood critics overcompensated with raves for Frenzy after those dark years when movies like "Vertigo" had been panned.
The further irony was that all this "homecoming cheer" for "Frenzy" was in the service of a movie that made viewers extremely uncomfortable when they entered the theater and viewed it. The lingering rape-murder scene may have been brilliant...but it sure wasn't fun. (All those critics raving about it probably told us something about the critics.)
I felt then and feel now that the success of "Frenzy" was almost apart from the movie itself -- all those "Return of the Master" reviews were worth it regardless of whether one liked the movie or not.
I liked it then. I love it now. It is intricate in its plotting, intelligent in its dialogue, solid in its atmosphere(Covent Garden with all those workers moving to an fro like worker ants), at once a nostalgia piece AND a brutally new wave look at human depravity, a "wrong man movie" and a "psycho thriller" rolled into one. Hitchcock returns to England. And: one of his greatest villains in Bob Rusk("The better the villain, the better the picture," said Hitchcock.) Against "North by Northwest" and "Rear Window," it is a very small movie...a movie geared to be made by an old man...but that doesn't negate its power any more than the smallness of "Psycho" negates that(greater) film.
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"Family Plot," made back at backlot Universal Studios when Hitchcock was four years older and sicker than when he made "Frenzy", is good, but not quite the polished Pinewood Studios foreign job that "Frenzy" was. Still, they are a fine pair: a grim and grisly shocker followed by a lighthearted comedy trhiller that allowed Hitchcock to leave the scene with a wink. (And, perversely, the grim and grisly shocker had been pretty damn funny in places too --the Oxford dinners, for instance.)
And as one critic wrote, "Frenzy" and "Family Plot" together were a "second wind" for Hitchcock after his late sixties debacles(debacles that I, personally, actually like very much, I might add.)
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