Frenzy

Reposted from 8 February 2008 as a tribute to Anna Massey, who died yesterday.

'Frenzy', Hitchcock's penultimate film, is often dismissed as one of his lesser works, a violent and misanthropic little number, a disappointment that was mercifully superceded by the playful plotting and 'Trouble With Harry'-style humour of his swansong,'Family Plot'.

It's also cited for its controversial aspects. 'Frenzy' contains what no Hitchcock film that came before it had (but which some of his best had strived for, albeit working around the edges due the social, and censorial, mores of the time): graphic violence (sexual assault, strangulation), nudity (body doubles ahoy!) and profanity - the script, by Anthony ('The Wicker Man') Shaffer, uses the word "bastard" with the same liberality as'Goodfellas' uses "fuck". Indeed, one of the numerous anti-social pleasures of 'Frenzy' is the vehemence with which Jon Finch, playing down-on-his-luck former squadron leader Richard Blaney, spits it out.

Blaney is the ... no, not hero. He's quarrelsome, obstreperous, self-pitying and loud-mouthed. Okay; start over: Blaney is the ... no, not protagonist either. The suffix "pro-", as in "pro-active" doesn't suit him. For most of the film he's completely in the dark, unaware that his sometime friend Robert Rusk (Barry Foster) is behind the killings that he finds himself in the frame for.

If you've never seen 'Frenzy' and you're cursing me for not putting "spoiler alert" in capital letters before that last paragraph, pray desist with the Blaney-like "you bastard" and be assured that I'm not giving anything away. Hitchcock reveals Rusk's guilt early on. It's not a whodunnit, after all. It's about how Blaney, through his own bullishness, paints himself as fitting the murderer's profile, how Rusk capitalises on it, and how Blaney, with the full force of the law against him, tries to clear his name.

Which brings me back to something I was debating earlier. We've pegged Rusk as the villain of the piece. But Blaney - let's just call him the main character - isn't much of a hero. So who's our main man? Who do we root for? There's Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowan), the journeyman copper socially embarrassed by his wife's pretentions to nouvelle cuisine (Oxford's dinner table expositional dialogue, delivered while he queasily faces up to a succession of repulsive-looking meals, are a comedic highpoint). But he's only in the film for the second half and, apart from twigging late in the game that Blaney might be innocent, he doesn't exactly do much.

There are two sympathetic female roles - Blaney's ex-wife Blenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) and his current girlfriend Babs (Anna Massey), but with the murderer targetting women ... well, you can pretty much guess the rest.

The most frequently levelled criticism is the film's treatment of women. There's no way around it, so here goes: the necktie murderer (so named for the apparel he leaves around their neck, post-strangulation) rapes his victims first. While nowhere near as explicit as that in, say, 'Straw Dogs' (made a year before in 1971), the rape scene in 'Frenzy' is easily the most disturbing thing Hitchcock ever filmed, Rusk murmuring "lovely ... lovely" as he forces himself on his victim.

Rusk's luring of his next victim into his apartment is handled a lot more subtly, and with a moment of technical bravura: as Rusk closes the door behind them, the camera floats back down the stairs in complete silence, out through the lobby and, with the first tinges of traffic noise impeding once more on the soundtrack, into the street and away from the building. The effect, particularly the use of silence, is powerful. A pity Hitchcock couldn't have thought his way around the earlier scene with such finesse and technical aplomb.

The Argento-like camerawork in this scene makes it one of two genuinely memorable sequences in the film. The second, involving Rusk's dumping of a body in the back of a truck - and his desparate attempts to recover a piece of evidence he realises he's left on the corpse - spins out into a blackly comic extended set-piece. Claustrophobic, grotesque and a damn sight funnier than it ought to be, Rusk's tussle with a body stiff with rigor mortis in the back of potato lorry is pure Hitch. And if it doesn't quite the achieve the level you'll-never-look-at-a-King-Edward-in-the-same-way-again greatness that 'Psycho' does with shower curtains, it’s still an effective signifier of Hitchcock’s streak of the perverse.


i.m. Anna Massey (11 August 1937 – 3 July 2011)

The 39 Steps

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 48 of 100

John Buchan’s 1915 novel ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ is a pacy and entertaining bit of escapism, the espionage plot of which struck a chord with pre-First World War readers (and was also, apparently, hugely popular among enlisted men during the actual conflict). It is also riddled with wild coincidences and implausible plot developments. For instance, fugitive Richard Hannay decides to go on the run to Scotland when he’s implicated in a murder for no other reason than Buchan was a Scotsman – was, in fact, the 1st Baron Tweedsmuir – and knew the locale. When Hannay blunders, entirely by chance, into the one house in all of Scotland occupied by a foreign agent, he identifies the man as his nemesis purely by deciding that there’s something a bit off about him. The denouement – in which the now exonerated Hannay, having thrown in his lot with British Intelligence, works out location of the thirty-nine steps of the title – is based on such obfuscatory gobbledegook that you’d need an entire branch of quantum physics to properly explain it. Sure, the book’s a fun (if dated) read, but its structure is so random and its narrative arc not so much join-the-dots as hide the dots and hope nobody notices that it’s enough to make a screenwriter throw everything out and just start over with the title.

Which brings us to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps’, the numerical titular replacement just one of several improvements on the source material. Made in 1935 (and striking the same pre-war chord with audiences that the book did), it was – astoundingly – Hitchock’s twentieth film as director (discounting 1922’s unfinished ‘Number 13’ and 1923’s ‘Always Tell Your Wife’, for which he was uncredited) and his second straight-up masterpiece following ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ made the previous year. That film was the first full exposition of Hitch’s talent for the thriller, full of nerve-wracking suspense and brilliantly orchestrated set-pieces (his lachrymose 1956 remake is a pale imitation). ‘The 39 Steps’, by extension, provides the first complete template for the innocent accused/man-on-the-run narrative that Hitch would return to again and again through the next four decades of his career. It’s often cited as the key work of his British film period and it’s easy to see why. Personally, I prefer ‘The Lady Vanishes’, but since that doesn’t have a number in the title it’ll have to wait until business is concluded on the Operation 101010 front.

Hitchcock kicks off ‘The 39 Steps’ with a murder in a music hall during an act by the rotund and not particularly charismatic Mr Memory, an individual with a prodigious talent for retaining all manner of facts and figures. Mr Memory is Hitchcock’s first deviation from Buchan’s story, and it’s an inspired touch; likewise, the climax brings us right back to the artifice of the stage show but this time the true importance of Mr Memory is revealed. None of this is in the book. Then there’s the matter of the doomed secret agent to whom Hannay gives temporary shelter: it’s a dude in Buchan’s opening chapter. Hitch has other ideas and prefigures the later sexual tension between Hannay (Robert Donat) and Pamela (Madeleine Carroll) by re-imagining the spy as the exotic and obviously pseudonymed Annabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim). When she’s (MODERATE SPOILER) assassinated, she stumbles towards Hannay clutching a map of Scotland. The two heavies killing time outside Hannay’s apartment leave him in no doubt that he’s next in line. Giving them the slip, he hightails it to the highlands (by way of a bit of derring do on the Forth Railway Bridge; Hitchcock and trains, anyone?) and the plot shifts up a gear.

Buchan, at this point, has Hannay variously helped or hindered by a road worker, a radical politician, an inn-keeper, an archaeologist and a fisherman. While Hitch retains the politico and the publican, he jettisons the remainder of Buchan’s subsidiary character in favour of having Hannay spend the latter half of the film handcuffed to a haughtily gorgeous blonde. A round of applause, ladies and gentlemen, for Madeleine Carroll, the first of Hitchcock’s ice maiden blonde heroines: for every Grace Kelly or Tippi Hedren who came afterwards, Madeleine Carroll set the standard. (The same can be said for Robert Donat: the Cary Grant and James Stewart protagonists of Hitchcock’s later films all owe a debt to Donat’s gentleman adventurer.) Indeed, Hitch is so fixated on the chemistry – most notably in a censor-baiting (for 1935) scene in which Pamela removes her nylons while Hannay’s handcuffed hand can’t help but follow the admittedly elegant contours of her legs – he all but forgets that Hannay’s running for his life by this point.

But with Hitchcock – particularly in this kind of lightweight romantic thriller – it was always about the chase, never the catch; and what better reason for a chase than a MacGuffin? ‘The 39 Steps’ (the title means something utterly different to Buchan’s literal representation of it) has a humdinger of a MacGuffin. It’s something Mr Memory rattles off in the closing seconds and it’s all but meaningless. While you’re caught up in the hare’s-breadth, last-gasp rush of Hitchcock’s storytelling it seems to give the whole breathless affair a weight and a raison d’etre. Stop to think about it for a while and it doesn’t hold water (why risk Mr Memory blowing the gaff when you could just put the [MacGuffin] on a piece of microfilm the size of a baby’s little finger and have it out of the country in no time?). In the hands of an inferior filmmaker, the MacGuffin would stand out as a glaring flaw. Hitchcock’s genius wasn’t just that he could get away with it but that he made it intrinsically Hitchcockian.