The "Frenzy" Promotional Gimmicks of 1971 and 1972 -- Psycho Revisited, Becomes Vertigo Theme

I always thought this was poignant: On the comeback trail from a string of failed films, Hitchcock launched a comeback with Frenzy in 1972. Part of his strategy -- since he was making his first film about a psychopathic homicidal maniac SINCE Psycho, was to try to get some promotion going for the movie just like he done in 1960 FOR Psycho. The result was actually similar to "Vertigo" as Hitchcock tried to "bring back the past":

"Frenzy" was released in June of 1972, but began filming, in London, in the summer of 1971. I was young then and the family took "Time" magazine at home, and it turned out that Time had some sort of "Hitchcock worship" going on because they put about four small articles about the filming of "Frenzy" in their "People" section(the forbear of "People" magazine) that summer. I read all of them with a young fan's delight.

One of the articles -- with no photo -- discussed, in detail, how Frenzy would have this scene where a woman enters a killer's apartment with the killer and the camera leaves the scene and backs down a staircase. I mean, the ENTIRE SCENE was detailed in this article. As a young Psycho fan, I recall thinking: "Sounds like a great scene and shot but -- we don't get to see the MURDER? What kind of horror film is this?"

The other articles each had a photo of Hitchcock on location: one of him scowling among the people of Covent Garden(just to SEE him was a pleasure, and Time knew it). One of him sitting on a bench next to a duplicate of his HEAD(he took quite a few photos with that head).

And a third photo wasn't of Hitchcock himself, but of a full scale DUMMY of Hitchcock, floating in the River Thames.

Now, Time wrote a little article to go with that photo, but it was a straight out lie: "In his traditional cameo in his upcoming movie, Frenzy, Alfred Hitchocck will appear as a murder victim floating down the River Thames."

Even to this young reader something felt wrong about that description. Hitchcock did "walk on cameos" in his movies, he didn't play characters? Why would Hitchcock play a body? He couldn't be playing a murder victim of the killer, right? Impossible. Thus somewhat lazy writing(even in Time magazine) reminds us that for all the intelligence of great filmmakers employing great screenwriters(like Hitchcock on Frenzy) the promotion can be, well...kinda stupid.

As it turned out, the floating Hitchcock dummy on the Thames was used for the TRAILER of the movie, with a cut from the dummy to the real Hitchcock(lying down, in close-up, looking like he was going to explode from blood filling his face) talking about his new movie. Fair enough

That Hitchcock dummy -- and its detachable head -- got a lot of play after Frenzy stopped filming in 1971. To promote the release of Frenzy in June 1972, the dummy was moved from London to a pond at Universal Studios. The dummy floated as University of Southern California cheerleaders incongruously danced around it. REALLY. There is footage of this.

The detached head was also placed in the kitchen refrigerator of the Hitchcock home so that Alma Hitchcock could pose next to it. Cute.

But here's the thing: when Frenzy went into production in 1971, Hitchcock was supposedly "in decline, irrelevant, no longer a great for today." After The Birds, the sequence of Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz (despite good reviews for each from some critics) it just seemed like Hitchcock was over.

And the Frenzy promotion - starting in 1971 -- seemed to be Hitchcock telling the world: "I am NOT over. I'm making another movie like Psycho -- and I'm going to promote the macabre hell out of this new psycho killer movie."

I recall this as a weirdly nostalgic yet unsettling time. It was Vertigo in real life -- Hitchocck was trying to bring back the days when he WAS big(the TV show, the hit movies) and when PSYCHO was big -- as was the promotion for it, in all its secrecy. It FELT like "the good old days" but it really WASN'T the good old days. When Frenzy was released, it got GREAT reviews, and OK box office but...it didn't really dominate the year in any way. Hitchocck's "nostaglic promotion" wasn't quite justified by the movie he made this time. (That it featured stranglings, not stabbings, was part of the problem, and the rape factor made it unappetizing.)