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Frenzy (1972) - quotes

Quotations relating to Frenzy (1972)...

Pre-Production

The difference between the novel and the movie script is that we added a lot of comedy noir, which Hitch was always very fond of. And in particular, in those scenes of exposition, where the detective, Alec McCowen, is brought to realize that, on the basis of a lot of circumstantial evidence, he has arrested the wrong man who is currently in jail. And how does he come to realize that he has made that mistake?

So the way to do it, I thought, was to do it as comedy. And the comedy comes, of course, from his wife, played by Vivien Merchant, who is a gourmet cook. And she keeps giving him the most repulsive and inedible meals. And he is struggling desperately, I think, with a pig's trotter or knuckle of pork or something like that, whilst reprising the entire deductive plot. Even if you're laughing and you don't hear it, no one can complain later that there's a big hole in the picture. Because how did the detective suddenly realize that he had made a mistake? The audience have been actually told word by word. It does seem to me that we had our cake and ate it, for once, which is always nice.

I think what we wanted to do was extend to the last possible moment the fact that our hero is in danger — that he's a loser... that he cannot win this one. He hits this creature in the bed, believing it to be Rusk, on the head. The arm falls out of the bed. We realize it's not a man at all. It's a woman. Just another victim of the Necktie Murderer. In the book, we have a different victim in the last scene. The secretary of Blaney's wife in the matrimonial agency is the victim, and in the film we have an anonymous lady who we never met before.

— Anthony Shaffer (2001)
keywords: Alec McCowen, Frenzy (1972), Vivien Merchant, pre-production, and screenplay

Casting

I went up, in fact, for the part of the secretary. I didn't go up for Babs. And we went into this huge, vast room in Piccadilly where [Hitchcock] was doing the auditions. And he sat behind this desk. I sat down. And he started talking about deep refrigeration and how to make batter. There was this huge room he said he had in his house which was his fridge, and he told me how he made batter for batter pudding, and he kept it in this vast fridge. So I was completely mesmerized by this.

Then he started talking about this barmaid. I was totally confused by this time, 'cause he hadn't asked me to read for the secretary or anything. Anyway, this barmaid had to be quite short, and I found myself taking my shoes off. I don't know why, because I wasn't up for the barmaid. I was up for the secretary. Anyway, when I got up to go — I'd forgotten I'd taken my shoes off, so I had to put my shoes on — and he didn't say whether he wanted me or not. Nothing, and no script was given. And the next day, my agent rang, and he said, "He wants you for the Cockney barmaid, Babs." I said, "This is amazing." So I said yes to work with Hitchcock, of course. Count me in.

— Anna Massey (2001)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Frenzy (1972), casting, and pre-production

I think why Hitchcock asked me to play it was, at that moment, I hadn't had a big film released, but I'd just finished Macbeth for Roman Polanski, which was big news at the time. Hadn't opened. And, of course, I was gonna be cheap, you see. Now, it was a very cheap film, "Frenzy". They didn't spend a lot of money. They didn't, for example, provide cars for anybody to go to the set or go to the studio. You just got your own taxi or you came on a bike or whatever you did.

So, anyway, they asked me... just asked me to do it, see? They go through a book. You know, you got a casting director. Casting directors don't do a lot. I mean, there's not much they can do. But they say, "Well, this so-and-so. How about him?" And Hitchcock presumably said, "Yeah, I think he looks all right. What's he doing at the moment?" So suddenly my agent went, "Oh, yeah. Would you like, I'll get Roman Polanski?" Roman's doing everything down in Shepperton. He's saying, "I'll do anything. You wanna see the film? I'll show you rough cuts. I'll do this and do that." Hitchcock didn't want to see a frame. Nothing. But he said, "I've got to see whether he can act and what he looks like on film." And my agent got a television movie that I'd done — simple thing shot in black and white in '69, I think it was — and showed it to him. So he said, "Yeah, he'll do."

So I came to see him around the corner from the Dorchester, which is where we are now, and he said, "Jon, nice to see you." Ba-ba-ba-bom. I was, you know, like half in shock seeing the man anyway. "Do you like the script?" I said, "Yes, of course." You know, as you do. And, uh, so he said, "I've seen the film that your agent showed me. You can act. That's good. Would you like to do it?" "Yes, I would." "Okay. Let's go and have lunch." And that was it. So it was done. And, I, you know... Of course I couldn't believe it. I was stunned. Absolutely stunned.

— Jon Finch (2001)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Frenzy (1972), casting, and pre-production

I'd had a couple of successes in the West End onstage, and I was doing a play by David Mercer at the Criterion called "After Haggerty", with Billie Whitelaw. Someone said, "Oh, Alfred Hitchcock's in tonight." "Oh, really. Mm-hmm." Next morning, my agent said, "Mr. Hitchcock would like to meet you at 100 Piccadilly." So, along I went. He said, "I'm making this picture about a murderer. I'd like you to take the script away and tell me if you'd like to play it."

So, well, the short story is that he sent for a couple of books about a pretty well-known murderer we had over here called Neville Clevely Heath, who masqueraded as a squadron leader. And I went off on a short holiday to read and came back and made the picture, and I always thought, when people asked, "How on earth did you get the part?" I said, "Well, he came to see the play."

It was halfway through shooting the picture. I was talking with his personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, and she said, "Oh, no, no, no. That isn't how you got the part." Um, what happened was that I'd made a film a few years earlier called "Twisted Nerve" — again with Billie Whitelaw. And this picture, in almost all the notices, they referred to it as sort of having a Hitchcock flavor to it, and, apparently, seeing me in the part I played in that, that decided him I would be okay for Bob Rusk in "Frenzy". So, that's how wrong you can be about, where you got where you did.

— Barry Foster (2001)

Blaney's wife's secretary, who's played by Jean Marsh... It was a stroke of genius to make her look so dowdy and dull and spinsterish, and obviously very repressed. Because Jean was then and still is an extremely beautiful, vivacious, marvelous woman.

— Barry Foster (2001)
keywords: Frenzy (1972), Jean Marsh, casting, and pre-production

The Production Process

He hired the actors the same way he hired the stage carpenter — on the assumption that they knew their job, they knew what to do. So rehearsal was minimal. But on the other hand, the build up to the rape and murder scene with Barbara... There I was completely free. He'd set up the camera for the scene, and I remember saying, "Well, I'd like to walk around there and pull the file out and slam it back," or do whatever he did. And he said, "That's fine. Okay. Uh, we'll move the camera, accommodate what, uh, Mr. Foster wants to do." Absolutely no problem. Absolute freedom I felt.

The rape and murder scene with Barbara Leigh-Hunt took three days to shoot. Before we started, we had Hitch's storyboard, which is an incredibly helpful thing for the actor. Fortunately, it involved chopping up the action into short and intense sequences. There's a mid-shot of the two of us, Barbara splayed out on her swivel chair, me on top of her. We got to get through two or three lines, mostly hers, of course, protesting. There might have been six or seven takes of that. That was extremely distressing. The flashes of nudity, of the breasts and so on, were done by a professional model. It's not at all pleasant, doing that stuff.

The tie, of course, is pre-tied and stitched so it can't move. I can do all this... till the cows come home, just as you'd have to do onstage. All the work is being done by the actress. We would just console each other. "Just another day and a half and we'll be through with this."

She sticks her tongue out, as Hitch asked her to, and the effect is genuinely horrendous. Hitch did experiment with having an extremely close lens at her mouth, getting through makeup, saliva and blood. Hitch, I think, was trying to plumb the ultimate in horror there.

— Barry Foster (2001)
Foster talking about the rape/murder scene

At my interview, and certainly when I had other meetings with Hitch, he never said, "Do you mind stripping in the bedroom scene?" I'd assumed that I'd be doing it, but the double did it. So, when you cut away, and this nude figure just wearing socks goes into the bathroom, that's not me.

— Anna Massey (2001)
keywords: Frenzy (1972), nudity, and production

I used to write notes every single night to his secretary, Peggy. And he was very good. Most of the time he'd say, "All right. Correct it." He wasn't annoyed that I'd pointed out, maybe, a syntactical error or something like that. He did say once, "Jon, I said you could make alterations. I didn’t say you could rewrite the whole script," which I was trying to do, I must have been.

— Jon Finch (2001)

It's a very London film, and I know he wanted to make that. I think he thought — whether he thought rightly or wrongly is another matter — that people thought that he had rather sold out and gone to live in Hollywood. I personally don't think that he would have been the world success he became had he stayed here in England.

When we were filming in Covent Garden, a curious thing took place that a very old man came up to him. I remember security men running in very quickly because you know what goes on these days, or even in those days. It wasn't quite as bad, but nonetheless... And he said, "I remember your father here in the market." Hitchcock was delighted, of course. He said, "Leave him alone," sat him down, had a long talk with him about his dad, gave him a great meal and sent him on his way. It's a nice touch, but he was finding and feeling his roots as they had been.

— Anthony Shaffer (2001)

When we had done the first murder, it's a pretty graphic account of a rape and strangulation, and I didn't see any point in repeating ourselves. And so I introduced a phrase into the first murder. I said to Hitch, "Let's not see another murder." Why don't we just have the murderer take her up to his apartment, open the door for her and say, "You're my kind of woman" and close the door. We know exactly what is happening behind that closed door, and there's a wonderful shot that follows that. It's what Hitch called his "good-bye to Babs." The camera retreats and down a narrow, twisting staircase.

— Anthony Shaffer (2001)
keywords: Frenzy (1972) and production

He suddenly realizes that the tie pin is in my clenched hand. The audience could not possibly have gathered that without a flashback sequence, which Hitchcock storyboarded. I knew from the start that I wasn't going to have to go in the potato sack, other than the close-up on my face, but I was never in the truck. They always had a double for that.

— Anna Massey (2001)
keywords: Frenzy (1972) and production

The potato lorry sequence was another three-day affair, though very much more light-hearted and bearable than the three days of rape and murder. It was something like 114 cuts. There again, how useful the storyboard was, because, uh, I'm scrabbling away, and all of a sudden this bare foot comes and hits me in the jaw. And, of course, Hitch's drawing was, uh, you know, quite grotesque, which immediately told the actor he wants a laugh there. Amidst all this gruesome business, the audience will laugh.

That was the model's hand when I finally found the tie pin. Given the right sound effects, you could just do that. If you've got the right sound effects, you'll think that really is a broken finger. It was a very dusty, messy business, but on the whole most enjoyable, and a most instructive three days.

— Barry Foster (2001)
Foster talking about the sequence on the potato truck
keywords: Frenzy (1972) and production

The last scene of the picture is one of the few occasions I had direction from Hitch. I drag up this huge trunk up into my apartment. I get it through the door, and waiting in my room is the chief inspector of the police. And I sort of dropped my head or something... something corny. And Hitch said, "Don't drop your head." He says, "That is the last thing a serial murderer is going to do, as it were, admit defeat." So he said, "Just don't... don't drop your head. Drop the trunk, but don't drop your head."

— Barry Foster (2001)
Foster talking about the final scene of the film
keywords: Frenzy (1972) and production

Hitchcock was also getting on in years when he directed "Frenzy", but he was still an interesting man to work with. He knew what the camera was seeing all the time. He would say, "What lens have you got on Paul?" I would say, for example, "A 35mm," and he would know what it was covering. He said, "You have to keep them on the edge of their seats." It was great working with people who knew what they were doing. With some directors you would stand on the set and realise that if you didn't say something and say where to put the camera, the director wouldn't know. In England, not so much now, you had the operator working in close co-ordination with the director. In America the DP would do everything and tell the operator what to do. Here we worked very closely with the director, getting the setups and choosing the angles while the DP got on with the lighting.

— Paul Wilson
Wilson talking about his experiences of working with Hitchcock on "Frenzy"

Post-Production

The music in "Frenzy" is good. It's one of the best scores he had without Bernard Herrmann. Henry Mancini, I think, did the original score, and then was let go. He brought Ron Goodwin in after letting Mancini go, and I think he did a very good job. It's the return to England, too, that Hitch probably infused that in the composer. There's a certain kind of nostalgia that Hitch must have felt that comes across in the score

— Peter Bogdanovich (2001)
keywords: Bernard Herrmann, Frenzy (1972), Henry Mancini, Ron Goodwin, music scores, and post-production

Other Quotes about Frenzy (1972)

I think, was it Truffaut who said after he saw it, said to Hitchcock, "It's a young man's picture." By that he meant it's a film with a lot of experimentation, a lot of risks. There's that moment when Anna Massey's walking into the street and all the sound goes away. That's unusual to do that. You have to have nerve to pull something off like that.

— Peter Bogdanovich (2001)

He was a revered character. He's one of the greatest names in 20th-century history, let alone the film industry. I thought it was right up there in terms of his later work in as much as it had chasing the wrong man, the amusing villain, and the discussion of married life and its ups and downs.

— Jon Finch (2001)
Finch talking about Hitchcock

It's a very brutal film, but it’s full of things [Hitchcock] loves, like food and London. It's a very loving portrayal of the Covent Garden Market, because now that’s moved over to Nine Elms and Battersea, and we knew at the time that Covent Garden wasn't going to be there forever, and Barry and I remember saying to one another this will be a very exclusive piece of film.

— Anna Massey (2001)

By putting [Hitchcock] in London with Frenzy, in touch with his roots, and by telling the story — when I say an old-fashioned way, I mean a very carefully constructed way — and I think the public responded to that very strongly. I know they did, and he got a big smash hit out of it, which cheered him up a lot and put him back on his pedestal again, where he remains to this day.

— Anthony Shaffer (2001)
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