Word: hitchcock
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...case there was any doubt, back in the dim days of Marnie and Topaz, Hitchcock is still in fine form. Frenzy is the dazzling proof. It is not at the level of his greatest work, but it is smooth and shrewd and dexterous, a reminder that anyone who makes a suspense film is still an apprentice to this old master...
Frenzy is the first film that Hitchcock has shot in England for more than 20 years. Like a prodigal at home again, he lets his camera roam lovingly across London-Tower Bridge to Covent Garden, Hyde Park to Scotland Yard, where Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) is trying to solve the unsavory murders of a dozen London women who have been strangled with a silk...
...film has some shaky motivation and more than a fair share of trickery, but Hitchcock is such a superb storyteller that few viewers will even notice till well after the final fadeout. What they will notice is the perversity of the film. In one mind-boggling sequence, Bob tries to pry his diamond pin from the stiff fingers of the corpse that he has stashed inside a potato sack...
...actors are all proficient; Foster's flamboyant Bob, picking his teeth with that tie pin, is particularly telling. There are also Hitchcock's usual moments of high comedy, here involving Inspector Oxford and his wife, who is taking a course in gourmet cookery and assaults her husband's stubbornly English palate with a selection of highly sauced dishes. It is an old joke that would have worn pretty thin but for the performances of Alec McCowen and Vivien Merchant, the most elegant comic acting seen in movies in a long while. " ·Jay Cocks...
...Alfred Hitchcock professed to be indignant at being misquoted. "It has been said that I called actors cattle. I would never say such a rude, insulting thing," he told TIME'S Gerald Clarke last week. "What I probably said was that all actors should be treated like cattle...