Roger Ebert's Flat-Out Wrong 1972 Review of Frenzy

I do believe that the late Roger Ebert has gone down as the most rich and famous movie critic in the history of that profession.

It was TV syndication that did it. First paired in a friendly adversary way with the thin and bald Gene Siskel(a foil to Ebert's overweight and longish hair) and then paired off with a series of other critics after Siskel died young of a brain tumor.

But before Ebert met Siskel, I do believe he was the print critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and, very importantly, Ebert won a Pulitzer Prize for his criticism, which made him sort of a Top Dog among critics.

Except, I suppose there was a "fish in a barrel" aspect to Ebert's win -- the Pulitzer Prize is for newspaper work and there weren't many really good newspaper critics out there in Ebert's heyday. (Pauline Kael wrote for a magazine.)

Ebert started writing movie reviews as a very young man in 1967, and those early reviews aren't much different than his near-death work in 2012. One difference, perhaps, is that Ebert's reviews as a young man came perhaps from a fellow without a full knowledge of film history and the world. He had to grow up a bit (and, according to Ebert himself, to lose a bad drinking habit that clouded his mind.)

Which brings me to Ebert's 1972 review of Frenzy. Overall, its OK and accurate. One senses that Ebert came in a little bit after all the critics who called Frenzy a "return to form," because Ebert leads off his review with "Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy is a return to old forms by the master of suspense..." Hmm...a little copycatting there.

But it is in the sentences AFTER that point that Ebert reveals some 1972 wrongheadedness about the movie and the man he is reviewing. And for me, its the old saw: I DO know Hitchcock history and Ebert so clearly did NOT, that I wondered how wrong his reviews were of directors I didn't know so well (Altman, for instance.)

Anyway, here come the "flat out wrong" aspects of Ebert's Frenzy review(a positive, four-star review, I might add):

EBERT SAYS:

"Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy is a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer forms have pleased movie critics but not his public."

WRONG BECAUSE: Hitchcock's "newer forms" (recent pictures from The Birds through Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz) did NOT please most critics. The Birds reviews rather split, but Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz really got drubbed. There were exceptions: Andrew Sarris very much liked Torn Curtain. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote "Topaz: Alfred Hitchcock at His Best" and put the film on his Ten Best of 1969 list. Still, for the most part, Hitchcock's work between The Birds and Frenzy was badly reviewed and seemed to mark a man in decline.

EBERT SAYS:

"This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the forties"

WRONG BECAUSE:

This is actually the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the THIRTIES: British, set in London, produced by local British talent with a British cast. And fairly low budget compared to most of the more plush studio-produced, big star stuff that Hitchcock made in America in...the forties.

More specifically, Frenzy is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the TWENTIES. One in particular: The Lodger, which, like Frenzy, was set in London, about a killer of women, and about a Wrong Man. Hitchcock almost "went out the same way he came in" with Frenzy and The Lodger.

EBERT SAYS:

"Hitchcock sets his action in the crowded back alleys of Covent Garden, where fruit-and-vegetable vendors rub shoulders with prostitutes, third-rate gangsters , bookies and barmaids."

Hmm. OK some of this is RIGHT(fruit and vegetable vendors; barmaids.) But "third-rate gangsters?" I don't recall ANY gangster as a character in Frenzy. Prostitutes? We don't see a single prostitute plying her trade -- Rusk's on-screen victims are "regular women" and there is no proof that any of his other victims are prostitutes.

Bookies. Well, Rusk gives Blaney a great tip on a horse(that proves right) and refers to " a little birdie" who told him, "and my little birdies are dependable." So I guess there is a bookie somewhere in the story, but not part OF the story. Unless you count Rusk.

I think the issue here is that Ebert creates a totally wrong headed version of the world of Frenzy: gangsters, hookers, bookies -- not really part of its world at all. That would be a noir, a movie about criminals. Frenzy is really only about ONE criminal: a sexual homicidal maniac.

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