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SPOILER ALERT!
Frenzy is an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It is misanthropic, misogynist, misogamist, homophobic, antifeminist, and illogical. Other than that, it’s quite a good movie.
When the movie begins, a British official, presumably the Minister of the Environment, is giving a speech along the banks of the River Thames, promising that it will soon be a clean river again, free of pollution, “clear of the waste products of our society.” As an example of said waste products, a naked woman is seen floating face down in the river with a necktie around her neck. From the remarks of the crowd, we gather there is another serial killer in London, one that strangles women with a necktie. The government official is deeply concerned: not about the woman, but that it appears to be his club tie that’s wrapped around her neck.
The scene changes, and we see a similar tie being tied around the neck of Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). He has a room upstairs from the pub he works in, and he begins the day by having a glass of brandy. The manager sees him do it, accuses him of stealing drinks, and fires him. As they exchange words, we see that Blaney has an explosive temper. His co-worker, Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), walks in and defends Blaney, saying he always pays for his drinks. The manager says he’s either a thief or a boozer, and he doesn’t need either one. Besides, he says, Blaney spends too much time “pulling on your tits,” and the customers talk about it. Babs snaps back, “What about you? Always fingering me.” The ugly side of sex is a theme of this movie.
Babs knows Blaney doesn’t have much money on him, but he’s too proud to borrow any money from her, or rather, borrow any more than he already has. He heads over to the fruit market, which is run by his friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). Unlike Blaney, Rusk is easygoing and has a good sense of humor. When he hears that Blaney has been fired, he pulls out a wad of cash and offers it to him, but Blaney refuses. Failing that, Rusk gives him some grapes, quoting his mother (who is quoting Mae West): “’Beulah, peel me a grape.’ That’s what my ol’ Mum used to say when I was a kid.”
Just then a police sergeant walks up, telling Rusk how much of a headache the necktie strangler is causing them. Noting that Rusk is a bit of a ladies’ man, he asks Rusk to let him know if any of his girlfriends have a “near miss” with someone like that.
“Sure,” Rusk replies. “Mind you, half of them haven’t got their heads screwed on right, let alone knowing when they’ve been screwed off,” he smirks, pleased with his witticism. He starts to introduce the sergeant to Blaney, but he has disappeared. We are, of course, supposed to wonder if Blaney is the necktie strangler.
Blaney steps into a pub to have another brandy. While in there, two distinguished-looking men enter, one apparently a solicitor, the other, a doctor. In a lighthearted tone, they begin discussing the necktie murders. A slightly plump, grey-haired barmaid serves them a couple of pints. Being informed as to what they were talking about, she says, with a naughty look in her eyes, “He rapes them first, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, I believe he does,” the solicitor says with amusement, giving his companion a knowing look.
With a similar look of amusement, the doctor adds, “I suppose it’s nice to know every cloud has a silver lining.”
“Oh,” the barmaid says, acting as though she is shocked.
Now, it is true that when this movie was made in 1972, women were still being advised that if rape is inevitable, they should just relax and enjoy it. And this advice was not only proffered by the men, but I heard women say this as well, including my own mother. Still, it was always assumed that the woman would survive the rape she enjoyed. To suggest deriving pleasure from being raped, knowing that strangulation might follow right after the man had his climax, is beyond gross.
While the doctor is speculating on the nature of the sexual psychopath behind the murders, saying they are most likely to kill when their desires are frustrated, we see Blaney being especially rude to the barman regarding the amount of brandy in his glass when he asks for another. The doctor continues, saying that these psychopaths usually don’t have a linking motive, which makes them hard to catch.
“Let’s hope he slips up soon,” says the solicitor.
The doctor replies:
In one way, I rather hope he doesn’t. [The solicitor looks surprised.] Well, we haven’t had a good, juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they’re so good for the tourist trade. Foreigners expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs, and littered with ripped whores, don’t you think?”
Blaney leaves the pub. Rusk greets him from his room on the second floor. His mother sticks her head out too, for she is visiting him. We can see that Rusk truly loves his mother. In real life, this would be a good thing; in a movie, a bachelor that loves his mother arouses suspicion; and in a Hitchcock movie, that is the sign of a psychopath. So, we’ve been warned.
Earlier, Rusk told Blaney to place a bet on a horse named “Coming Up.” (Hitchcock could have picked any name he wanted for this horse, so the inclusion of the word “coming” is deliberate.) He asks Blaney if he took his advice, since the horse won and paid twenty-to-one. Blaney lies, saying he placed a bet and made a killing. As he walks down the street, he becomes furious that he didn’t have the money to bet on the horse, throwing down the grapes that Rusk gave him earlier, and stomping on them.
He decides to visit his ex-wife at her business, the Blaney Bureau, offering “friendship and marriage.” As he walks up the stairs, a Miss Barling (Jean Marsh), apparently a secretary, is congratulating a couple that the Blaney Bureau has brought together, who plan to get married. They are physically mismatched, the woman being taller and wider than the man. But they do have a shared interest in beekeeping. As they head down the stairs, the woman informs the man about her first husband, how he got up at 5:30 every morning, cleaned the whole house without waking her once in fourteen years, and then brought her a cup of tea at 9:15, while she was still in bed. And then she brushes some dandruff off his shoulder, saying they’ll have to do something about that. After viewing that example of matchmaking success, Blaney goes into the office.
As we gradually learn, Miss Barling is a manhater. We are probably supposed to read her as a lesbian: she is not pretty, her hair is pulled back tight on her head, she wears thick-rimmed glasses, and she has a stern look on her face. She informs Mrs. Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) that Mr. Blaney is here to see her, and he goes into his ex-wife’s office. It’s not clear why he has come to see her. He’s too proud to ask for money. Apparently, he just wants to vent his spleen. He starts making snide remarks about the lonely-hearts business, saying that in an age where people think marriage is a “living hell,” he is surprised that she has any clients at all, obviously resentful of the fact that she divorced him several years ago. When Brenda asks him to lower his voice, he naturally raises his voice, saying she ought to marry off “Vinegar Joe” out there, referring to Miss Barling, preferably, he says, to a seven-hundred-pound Japanese wrestler to “iron out her creases.” Brenda tells Miss Barling to take the rest of the day off. As she is leaving, she hears a loud noise as Blaney slams his hand down on a desk, making her think he has hit Brenda.
He finally calms down and agrees to have dinner with her that night, at her club. While at dinner, he again becomes so agitated that he breaks the glass he is holding. He doesn’t realize it until later, while sleeping at a Salvation Army hostel, but at some point during the evening, she slipped twenty pounds into his raincoat pocket.
The next morning, while Miss Barling is at lunch, Rusk shows up at the Blaney Bureau. Even though Blaney and Rusk were friends, going back to when they were in the same squadron in the Royal Air Force, and even though Blaney was married to Brenda for ten years, she was apparently never introduced to Rusk. He is going by the name of Robinson. Brenda says they have been unable to match him with women that are willing to submit to his peculiarities. But Brenda is the one he wants anyway. What follows is an extended rape scene. With each thrust into Brenda, Rusk says, “Lovely!” while Brenda recites from Psalms 91, a prayer to a God that has no intention of getting involved in the matter. Finally, Rusk reaches an exquisite orgasm.
It is at this point that I must pause for a speculative comment. I can’t remember for sure, but I believe it was in 1971, a year before this movie came out, that I first heard a woman say that rape was not about sex. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but I let it go. My guess is that Hitchcock was also acquainted with this notion, and he decided to have some fun with it cinematically when he made Frenzy. For that reason, he made it abundantly clear that Rusk is in sexual ecstasy while raping Brenda.
Up to this point, Brenda has thought that this was just an ordinary rape, but then Rusk says, “You bitch! Women! They’re all the same, they are. I’ll show you.” When he removes his tie, she realizes that he is the necktie strangler. She screams and struggles, but is strangled all the same. Rusk helps himself to the money in Brenda’s purse, as well as the apple she was eating for lunch, and leaves.
Shortly after that, Blaney returns to the Blaney Bureau, perhaps to thank Brenda for the money she gave him. The door is locked, so he leaves, just as Miss Barling is returning from lunch, and she sees him. Minutes later, she discovers Brenda’s body.
Blaney calls Babs at the pub and asks her to pack up his stuff and meet him. She does so, but instead of using the money Brenda gave him to find some inexpensive lodgings while he looks for a new job, he figures this is a good time for him and Babs to check into a nice hotel and have sex in style. It costs him twelve pounds for one night. Converting pounds to dollars and adjusting for inflation, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars today. Babs wonders where he got the money. He tells her he spent the night at the Salvation Army hostel, but this morning he collected an old debt. At the hotel, he checks them in as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Wilde, presumably as a joke, because the real Oscar Wilde was a homosexual.
Meanwhile, the police are at the Blaney Bureau. Chief Inspector Tim Oxford (Alec McCowen) arrives. Miss Barling tells him that she saw Blaney leaving just before she arrived, and she also tells him how violent Blaney had become the day before. He asks her if she can describe Blaney, and she gives, as Oxford admits, an “extraordinarily precise description.”
“In my job,” she says, as she stares straight back at him, “I’ve learned to keep a sharp eye on men, Inspector.” Because Oxford is as nice a man as you could ever hope to meet, he is taken aback by being implicitly included in her animosity toward men.
Thanks to her description, published in the newspaper, the porter at the hotel realizes the next morning that the so-called Oscar Wilde is the man the police are looking for. As he says to the woman that registered Blaney and Babs, “You know, Glad, sometimes just thinking about the lusts of men makes me want to heave.”
He calls the police, but by the time they arrive, Blaney and Babs have sneaked out the back way, for they too have seen the newspaper, which was delivered to their room that morning. They end up sitting on a bench in a park. Babs is suspicious, suspecting he raped and murdered Brenda. Blaney argues that it would be ridiculous to suppose a man would rape a woman he had been married to for ten years. The idea is that a man’s passion for his wife, even an ex-wife, would have diminished to the point that rape would be out of the question. That is, it would be out of the question, if rape were about sex, and from Blaney’s point of view, that’s exactly what rape is about. Later in the movie, the same reasoning is advanced by the wife of Inspector Oxford, giving sexual indifference after years of marriage as the reason Blaney is not the necktie strangler. She says their own marriage is proof of that. Whereas the marriage between the Blaneys ended in a bitter divorce, the marriage between the Oxfords survives through mutual sufferance. But in both cases, there is an absence of sexual passion.
In response to Blaney’s argument, Babs replies that she’s always hearing about kinky things. (Like raping a woman for some other reason than sex, perhaps?) Then it occurs to Babs that he got the money for the hotel room from Brenda. Since he spent the night at the Salvation Army hostel, he did not have the money until the next day, when he raped and killed her, she concludes.
Blaney replies that he didn’t know about the money until later, that Brenda had sneaked it into his raincoat. Babs doesn’t believe that at first, but then agrees that if he had known about the money, he would never have spent the night with a bunch of old men. Therefore, she concludes, Blaney did not rape and murder Brenda.
That argument makes my head hurt. The obvious explanation, from Babs’ point of view, is the one she originally advanced: the reason he spent the night where he did was that he had not yet raped and murdered Brenda, after which he stole her money. And that, of course, is the theory of the case as far as the police are concerned. That Babs would be persuaded by Blaney’s argument is ridiculous.
Speaking of the police, at the building of the New Scotland Yard, Sergeant Spearman (Michael Bates) is watching Inspector Oxford devour his breakfast. He tells Spearman that his wife is taking a course in gourmet cooking, and they’ve never heard of the principle that “to eat well in this country, one must have breakfast three times a day, and an English breakfast at that.” Ugh! I eat food in the morning, but I haven’t eaten what you might call a traditional breakfast, either American or British, since I was in college. That’s when I had a revelation: you don’t have to eat stuff like eggs, toast, and grits in the morning; you can eat a cheeseburger or have a pizza.
Anyway, with all the evidence they have accumulated against Blaney, they figure he is their man. Spearman asks what men like Blaney are like. Oxford replies, “Oh, they vary, but not a lot. The thing to remember is they hate women, and are mostly impotent.” Spearman balks at the notion of impotency. Oxford elaborates: “Don’t mistake rape for potency. In the latter stage of the disease, it’s the strangling, not the sex, that brings them on.”
It’s clear that Oxford has embraced the rape-is-not-about-sex theory, but to the point of absurdity. All the victims of the necktie strangler were found dead. The only way the police could know that the women had been raped would be by finding semen in the vaginas of those women; the only way semen could be found in the vaginas of those women would be if their vaginas had been penetrated by a penis; the only way a penis can penetrate a woman’s vagina is if it is erect; and the only way a penis can be erect long enough for penetration and ejaculation would be if the man is not impotent. Q.E.D. Of course, this is Hitchcock’s ultimate jab at the claim that rape is not about sex. It’s almost as if Hitchcock is saying, “Well, if rape is not about sex, then there is no need for the rapist to have an erection.”
Babs quits her job at the pub. Like Blaney, she also had a room above the pub, and needs a place to stay. Rusk offers her his place while he will supposedly be out of town. She becomes his next victim. Blaney has two friends who could give him an alibi, but they don’t want to get involved. He turns to Rusk, who is only too glad to help, allowing him to stay at his place. But he plants evidence, Babs’ clothes and purse, in Blaney’s bag and calls the police. That’s when Blaney realizes Rusk is the necktie strangler, but no one believes him. He is convicted and sentenced to prison, swearing revenge against Rusk.
However, Inspector Oxford begins to have doubts. He gets a photograph of Rusk and shows it to Miss Barling. She identifies him as Mr. Robinson, saying they didn’t want him for a client because he wanted women who enjoyed certain peculiarities. When asked if Robinson would go to other agencies in search of women who were masochists, who liked being hurt, she says he would. Once again staring straight at Oxford, as if to let him know that her attitude toward men applies to him as well, she says, “Men like this leave no stone unturned in their search for their disgusting gratifications.”
After that, things wrap up nicely. Just as Inspector Oxford collects enough evidence to convince himself that Rusk is the necktie strangler, Blaney escapes from prison and heads for Rusk’s apartment. He gets inside, and seeing what he thinks is Rusk sleeping in bed, he bashes “his” head in three times with a tire iron. But the hand of a woman slides out of the sheets. Pulling down the covers, he sees Rusk’s latest victim, strangled with a necktie. At that point, Oxford comes in through the door, and Blaney thinks he will be blamed for this murder too. But then Rusk comes in through the door with a trunk. Inspector Oxford observes, “Mr. Rusk, you’re not wearing your tie.”
But now let’s take a step back and consider this movie again. Blaney is unworthy or our concern. As the manager of the pub says, even if Blaney is not a thief, he’s a boozer. Indeed, we see Blaney having three brandies while it’s still morning. He’s irritable and has a bad temper. He would not be a nice person to know.
Furthermore, he is irresponsible. Having just lost his job, he should be out looking for a new one. Instead, he wastes what little money he has on the two more brandies I just mentioned. The last thing he should be thinking about is playing the horses, but he becomes furious when he wasn’t able to place a bet on Coming Up. When he finds that Brenda has slipped twenty pounds into his pocket, he squanders twelve pounds on that hotel room instead of using the money to find an inexpensive flat to live in while he looks for a new job. And as an indication of how vain he is, he even takes pleasure slapping down the money, letting the woman who manages the hotel know that he has plenty of cash.
Let us imagine an alternative movie in which Blaney is the necktie strangler, who raped and murdered his ex-wife out of resentment for how well she was doing in her own business. In that case, Rusk not only would be innocent, but let us further imagine as well that he never patronized the Blaney Bureau. As the sergeant said, he was popular with women, so he would have no need of the Blaney Bureau for help in fixing himself up with a date. Rusk is likable, has a good sense of humor, and is willing to stand by his friends. We might even imagine Rusk saving Babs at the last minute before Blaney has a chance to kill her, and Rusk and Babs end up being the heterosexual couple that satisfies the formula for a happy ending. Moreover, it would be a clever twist to have the bachelor in a Hitchcock movie that loves his mother turn out to be the good guy.
As it is, the likable Rusk turns out to be guilty, while the unlikable Blaney is innocent and ultimately vindicated. But while we were sorry that Babs was one of Rusk’s victims, her death made the movie more palatable, in a peculiar sort of way. If Babs had not been killed off, we probably would have had her and Blaney be together at the end, ostensibly a happy ending, but not one that we could really accept. Brenda divorced Blaney for a good reason, and we don’t believe any woman would be happy with him, including Babs.