Frenzy at 50: The most violent film Hitchcock ever made

child of the Victorian age, Alfred Hitchcock was always fascinated by stories of the elusive Jack the Ripper and other supposedly "gentlemanly" murderers who lived in plain sight but stalked their victims from the shadows.

His third feature, 1927's silent thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, brought this macabre fixation to the screen and set the tone for much of the director's lauded career. In 1972, 51 films and almost as many years on from The Lodger, Hitchcock returned to London for what was to be his penultimate film, and final great work, Frenzy.

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On the surface, this project bore everything that audiences could expect from the ageing auteur – a murdered blonde and an innocent man clearing his name, served with lashings of suspense – but with the greater permissiveness of early 1970s cinema came a much nastier tone than Hitchcock had ever attempted before. Without fear of censorship and facing competition from a new wave of exploitation cinema, from US splatter horror to the Italian giallo, Hitchcock unleashed all his voyeuristic impulses on this shockingly brutal film. The result is, perhaps, just the sort of horribly graphic murder story that he’d always wanted to make, if only he'd been allowed.

Hitchcock had entered the 1960s at the peak of his powers, with the tremendous success of Psycho (1960) followed closely by The Birds (1963). However, three subsequent critical and commercial misfires – Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969) – appeared to suggest that the master of suspense was falling out of step with modern moviegoers. European influences and the collapse of Hollywood's censorious "Hays Code" had ushered in an edgier, more graphic, and more cynical US cinema.

The film allowed the famously repressed Hitchcock to explore the darker sides of sexuality and violence that had always fascinated him – Raymond Foery

"In the 1930s and '40s Hitchcock often said that women were his main audience as they were the ones who chose what to see when on a date, but by the '60s and '70s that demographic had changed – the key audiences were young and male, and they wanted to see on screen what couldn't be shown on television, and this meant violence and nudity," Caroline Young, author of Hitchcock's Heroines, tells BBC Culture.

In need of another hit and keen to return to a more modest style in the vein of Psycho, Hitchcock recruited the successful English playwright Anthony Shaffer to adapt Arthur La Bern's 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. "It is obvious upon reflection what must have attracted Hitchcock to it," writes Raymond Foery in his book Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy: The Last Masterpiece. "The 'wrong man' motif, the gruesome murders, the interplay between the police and the real criminal; all of these elements must have seemed quite familiar to Hitchcock."

A gritty homecoming

Frenzy was Hitchcock's first British film since 1950's Stage Fright, and the opening titles emphasise the director's homecoming with a grand aerial shot of the Thames, accompanied by Ron Goodwin's bombastic score. The rest of the film, however, adopts a more naturalistic aesthetic, a marked shift for Hitchcock. "It has the cinematic look of the more documentary-like 1970s; cinematographer Gil Taylor (and the uncredited Len South) created a palette that looks a lot more like The French Connection than, say, North by Northwest," Foery tells BBC Culture.

A blackly comic tone is swiftly established when a political rally outside London County Hall is interrupted by a nude female cadaver washing up on the riverbank. As Patrick McGilligan notes grimly in his Hitchcock biography A Life in Darkness and Light, this was "the buttocks shot Hitchcock had pursued since Psycho" – such nudity having been entirely obscured during the latter's famous shower scene.

The deceased is the latest victim of the so-called "necktie murderer", a serial rapist-killer whose identity is eventually revealed to the audience as Bob Rusk, a psychotic Covent Garden greengrocer brilliantly played by Barry Foster. Rusk seems a prototype of the "nice guy" villain trope. His suave, affable, and stylish exterior merely conceals a violent misogyny beneath. "I think villains should be very attractive men. Otherwise they’d never get near their victims," Hitchcock told an audience at the University of Columbia Film School in June 1972. "If you look at most of your cultural murderers, they're rather gentlemanly sort of fellows."

Due to Rusk's conniving, his friend Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a down-on-his-luck barman and former RAF pilot, is wrongly suspected of the killings and forced to go on the run with his girlfriend Babs (Anna Massey). Blaney is surely one of the most unlikeable heroes in cinema. Unlike the charismatic "wrong men" played by Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant in Hitchcock's earlier thrillers, Blaney is scruffy, aggressive, and mean, and so it is little surprise how quickly he is condemned when circumstantial evidence gathers against him. "Blaney is an angry, violent young man: we need time to sympathise with him," remarked Hitchcock in a 1972 interview with Ecran magazine. "Life has been very hard on him."

Hitchcock had struggled with the new wave of 1960s films stars; of his experience working with Paul Newman on Torn Curtain, Foery quotes Hitchcock complaining to François Truffaut, "As you know, he’s a 'method' actor." Filming Frenzy in London allowed Hitchcock to cast lesser-known faces from the West End, which worked towards the film's grittier approach. "It has no Hollywood walk of fame stars. No Cary Grant, no Jimmy Stewart, no Grace Kelly," says Foery. "Instead, Hitchcock was able to work with theatrically-trained actors who easily responded to his direction. No 'method' actors, no prima donnas, no celebrities… The result was a film populated by believable characters, 'ordinary' individuals rather than movie stars pretending to be ordinary."

Hitchcock's later films were marked by fetishised violence. I think it wasn't just a Hitchcock problem, but a problem with cinema at that time – Carolyn Young

Hitchcock's characteristically artful depictions of murder and violence are some of the most celebrated in his career, but the first on-screen killing in Frenzy is undoubtedly the director's most shocking and notorious. Blaney's ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) falls victim to Rusk in a sequence that Donald Spoto describes in his Hitchcock biography The Dark Side of Genius as "one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of film." Rusk's rape and strangulation of Brenda unfolds in sickening detail – even from half a century's distance, it remains an excruciating watch.

As a work of montage, the scene is a triumph on a par with the Psycho’s shower stabbing, but the gratuity of the violence and nudity is unlike anything else in Hitchcock's oeuvre. "In contrast to Psycho, which in promotions and in the film itself had titillated spectators with hopes of seeing Janet Leigh's breasts but which had withheld the full sight of the desired objects, Frenzy shows an extreme closeup of the woman's breast as she struggles to pull her bra back over it, all the while murmuring the words of the psalm. It is anything but lovely; it is infinitely sad, pathetic, among the most disturbing scenes cinema has to offer," notes Tania Modleski in her excellent book The Women Who Knew Too Much, which considers Hitchcock via feminist theory.

Hitchcock was not the only mainstream filmmaker of the period to present sexual violence with shocking verisimilitude. The previous year had seen the release of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, while 1972 also brought Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and John Boorman’s Deliverance. "The film allowed the famously repressed Hitchcock to explore the darker sides of sexuality and violence that had always fascinated him," says Foery. "The zeitgeist of the era inhabits Frenzy and freed Hitchcock to bluntly reveal the depravity that harks back to the Jack the Ripper era that fascinated him as a child."

While promoting Frenzy, Hitchcock denied that was merely indulging a fad for increased nudity, lamenting that he had not been granted such a free hand with his earlier films. Speaking at the Columbia Film School, he regretted the presence of Janet Leigh's bra in Psycho, "She should have been stripped, but then we weren’t allowed. There wasn't that 'permissiveness'."

How misogynistic is it?

The film's treatment of women was vehemently criticised at the time. A July 1972 article in the New York Times by Professor Victoria Sullivan asked "Does Frenzy Degrade Women?" Sullivan’s assessment was emphatic: "I suspect that films like Frenzy may be sicker and more pernicious than your cheapie humdrum porno flick, because they are slicker, more artistically compelling versions of sado-masochistic fantasies." Meanwhile, America's National Organisation for Women gave the film one of their annual "Keep Her in Her Place" awards for male chauvinism.

In The Women Who Knew Too Much, Modleski stops short of calling Hitchcock a misogynist, taking a more ambivalent view on Hitchcock's attitudes to women: "It seems to me more useful, however, to consider Frenzy not simply as the reflection of the dirty mind of a frustrated old man nor even of a new 'freedom' in sexual mores, but rather as a cultural response to women's demands for sexual and social liberation, demands that were, after all, at their height in 1972 when Frenzy was made," she argues. "...Hitchcock's fear and loathing of women is accompanied by a lucid understanding of – and even sympathy for – women’s problems in patriarchy."

It's true that while Hitchcock was happy to indulge gruesome images of women being murdered and mutilated, his female characters were never underwritten, and in the case of Frenzy they are certainly the warmest and most sympathetic parts the script has to offer. "Hitchcock's later films were marked by misogyny and fetishised violence, from the torture of Tippi Hedren and the rape scene in Marnie, to the brutal murders of women in Frenzy," Caroline Young tells BBC Culture. "I think it wasn't just a Hitchcock problem, but a problem with cinema at that time. Violence was being meted out to women on screen; they were being punished for their increasing sense of agency and this was being reflected back to audiences. In Frenzy, Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Anna Massey's characters are both independent women with careers, and they are punished for that independence. But rather than showing two-dimensional characters, Hitchcock painted these women with complexity so that the audience can identify with them. It's as if he's trying to arouse, and then shock and shame the audience for their enjoyment of violence."

Hitchcock was the supremely calculating exploiter of the full range of the medium's possibilities – [and] the freedoms of post-1960 allowed him to widen his canvas – Charles Barr

Frenzy may be more explicit than Hitchcock's previous work, but he had explored male violence, and suggestions of sexual violence, throughout his career. "I don't think of Frenzy as notably nastier than some of his other works – Shadow of a Doubt (1943) goes farther and deeper than Frenzy in this way," Sidney Gottlieb, editor of Hitchcock on Hitchcock and Hitchcock Annual, tells BBC Culture. "And I don't think that Frenzy shows Hitchcock unleashed in a way that establishes a model different from his lifelong practice of using the 'graphic' not as the essence but as one element of a much more complex 'pure cinema' of stylisation, subtlety, and suggestion. Even the quite brutal – and yes, graphic – murder of Brenda is highly stylised, and the nudity, as shocking and attention-getting as it is, is far from the main element in the sequence."

Indeed, there is nothing else in the film as brutal as Brenda's murder – in fact, the later murder of Babs is a quite ingenious exercise in restraint. As Rusk escorts her into his flat with the chilling invitation, "you're my type of woman," the door is closed on the audience and the camera slowly backs away from the scene into the busy street outside, a complex feat of camerawork which Hitchcock executes in one nauseating movement. The horribly inevitable crime has been set in motion, and this time Hitchcock refuses to indulge his audience with another exhibition of horror.

"I tend always to revert to the idea that Hitchcock was the supremely calculating exploiter of the full range of the medium's possibilities. Mainstream and avant-garde, Hollywood and non-Hollywood, montage and long-take, silent and sound, male focus and female focus, and so much more," Charles Barr, author of English Hitchcock, tells BBC Culture. "The freedoms of post-1960 allowed him to widen his canvas, as it were, but without renouncing the eloquently allusive methods that he had been using and refining throughout his career."

Frenzy premiered as the closing film at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and received a broadly rapturous critical response. Many of the contemporary reviews betrayed a sense of relief that the great Hitchcock had not produced another dud. Gene Siskel wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "Hitchcock, after a string of four indifferent films, is back providing grand entertainment," while the headline of Jay Cocks' review in Time Magazine declared the director was "still the master". The film would go on to outperform Psycho at the box office and become Hitchcock's most financially successful work for Universal.

Fifty years on, Frenzy remains a chillingly effective thriller and a curious bookend to the murderous saga which commenced with The Lodger. It is drenched in Hitchcockian verve, and, paradoxically, unlike anything he had made before. "Frenzy is steeped in the (English) past, yet contemporary in some of its ambitions, a testament to a director less encumbered by codes (of all sorts), but with complicated results that leave us wondering how well we ever really knew Hitchcock himself," Christine Sprengler, author of Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, tells BBC Culture.

Hitchcock had always been celebrated for his visions of male violence within aggressively patriarchal worlds, but with Frenzy he chose not to sugar the pill. Perhaps the film's savagery suggests how its director might always have operated in a less censorious industry – but then his final film, 1976's caper Family Plot, contains little of the nastiness which characterises Frenzy. It's more likely that Hitchcock was reluctant to age into the role of an antiquated heritage act, and even in the abrasive era of the New Hollywood, giallo, and exploitation cinema, the septuagenarian genius was still probing new ways of horrifying his audience.