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The 'teaser' trailer for Frenzy (1972)

posted 2 years ago by swanstep (2616)
3 replies | jump to latest

The original laserdisc version of Frenzy (1972) included the original, 1 minute long teaser trailer for the film, i.e., as well as the official 3 minute trailer beginning with Hitch apparently floating in the Thames. The transcript for that Teaser Trailer is as follows:

Alfred Hitchcock: "I´d like a dozen ties, please"
Tom Helmore (Gavin Elster from Vertigo!): "Yes Sir. Any preference? Stripes, solids. Any particular colours?"
Alfred Hitchcock: "No, I don´t care very much. It´s... They´re for a friend of mine. He uses them to strangle women."
Card: Frenzy
(clips from film) "My god, the tie"
Card: Alfred Hitchcock´s Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock: "Frenzy will get you by the throat."
Card: Coming soon

The use of Vertigo's Elster in the trailer has always been a kind of catnip for Hitchcockians, so it's somewhat surprising and depressing that this trailer seems to have mostly vanished.

Frenzy's teaser trailer was viewable on-line for at least a brief time during the 2000s at some major film site like TCM or Hitchcockzone (I'm still kicking myself for not having saved a copy at that time), but I don't remember which site it was and at any rate there's no trace of it anywhere on-line now except for two framegrabs (and the transcript) here:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/feature-articles/hitchcocks_trailers_part2/

If anyone has a copy of the teaser trailer (or even any additional framegrabs from it) or knows where to find it online, I'd be truly obliged and grateful if they'd post a note about it here.

Is there some angel-hero out there with the laserdisc who can just encode and upload the Teaser Trailer to youtube or some other central platform for posterity's sake?

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

This post reminds me that I'm still looking for a copy of the original *short* (just 1 minute long - teaser) trailer for Frenzy (1972) whose transcript is as follows:

Alfred Hitchcock: "I´d like a dozen ties, please"
Tom Helmore (Gavin Elster from Vertigo!): "Yes Sir. Any preference? Stripes, solids. Any particular colours?"
Alfred Hitchcock: "No, I don´t care very much. It´s... They´re for a friend of mine. He uses them to strangle women."
Card: Frenzy
(clips from film) "My god, the tie"
Card: Alfred Hitchcock´s Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock: "Frenzy will get you by the throat."
Card: Coming soon

---

Its a great request, swanstep, and I hope it leads to a successful "get." Keeping parts of movie history alive for storage "somewhere"(your private collection, donation to the Academy?) is a worthwhile pursuit.

I wanted to add some comments as part of my own attempt to "leave a little Hitchcock history behind":

Somebody somewhere sent that trailer out in a chat room I once attended. I recall that the trailer had some sort of 'video time stamp" in the corner, saying something like "for promotional purposes only." What's important here is that this was the first time I saw that teaser since on TV in 1972 and I noticed (a) the salesman was, indeed, Gavin Elster himself!(thus linking Frenzy to Vertigo) and (b) once Hitchcock reveals that he is buying the ties for a friend who is a killer -- the face of the "amiable salesman" darkens knowingly, and supportively. It is as if Bob Rusk has murderous allies in Hitchcock and Gavin Elster. A creepy little final "touch" -- ends the teaser on a grim note.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Meanwhile, back IN 1972, when I first saw the "buying neckties TV commercial" it was in this highly nostalgic context:

When Frenzy came out, I was not living in Los Angeles as I had been a few years before. The city I lived in had limited TV channels and "reach," but one of those few channels was a "local independent" that tended to run TV series re-runs and old movies a lot.

In the summer of 1972, "out of the blue," that local channel ran, each night Monday through Friday at 11:00 pm...episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock HOUR,which was noteable because those were "bigger, longer and somewhat hipper" than the 50's half hour show, and with some more familiar stars.

I made time to watch as many of those Alfred Hitchcock Hours as I could. I was a pretty intense Hitchcock fan at the time and I had not really watched the hours first run when I was younger. These hours were very helpful to my "Hitchcock education" -- including the ONE sole hour that Hitch directed called "I Saw the Whole Thing" which opens with a classic Hitchcock set-piece on TV terms. (Hitch directed quite a few of the earlier half hour shows; his move to only direct one of the hours was , perhaps, an early clue that he would soon discontinue the TV series -- even with high ratings -- and edge into semi retirement.)

Anyway, EACH of those Alfred Hitchcock Hours came equipped with one or two "Frenzy" commercials. One was the one where Hitchcock buys neckties from Gavin Elster. The other was more "generic," but I think Hitchcock still appeared in it (given that Frenzy had no stars, but also given its connections to Psycho and the Psycho trailer -- Hitchcock WAS the star of these commercials.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

What I came to realize was that Universal had elected for the summer of 1972(June, July, August) to ship the Alfred Hitchcock Hour out to local channels WITH Frenzy commercials so as to create "the Hitchcock Frenzy Summer of 1972" -- combining the "old" Hitchcock of only a few years before in the 60's(but how quickly those black-and-white TV years were slipping into the past) with "new" Hitchcock of a Technicolor London Psycho and the R rating.

For a young Hitchcock buff, that 1972 summer was a surprisingly "pro-Hitchcock" time on TV. Still, I felt it was in some ways a failed attempt to bring "the hype of Hitchcock" back when he was simply too old to carry on the same way. It was happy, but a little sad, that "Frenzy" summer of Alfred Hitchcock Hours.

Meanwhile: those neckties. In the book from which Frenzy was taken, the strangler uses his bare hands and in one case, a stocking, to kill. Somebody -- Hitchcock? Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer? -- came up with the idea to make give the killer a "motif" (neckties) and it gave Frenzy a galvanizing central object around which to focus -- in the posters, in those commercials and in the movie itself -- the Necktie Strangler gave himself a PR tool and killed women with a very male article of clothing, leaving it tied around the victims' necks(pre-DNA). Not to mention the strong use of the tiepin as a MacGuffin.

Brilliant. Pure Hitchcock. (And don't get me started on the potatoes.)

I might add that the "Frenzy" summer seemed very much geared towards trying to recreate the publicity blitz that Psycho had had in 1960. Hitchcock had largely stayed out of the trailers for Torn Curtain and Topaz, but he came back on screen to promote Frenzy with a trailer that very much echoed the 1960 Psycho trailer in talking about how ' a very horrible murder took place here." It worked as nostalgia.