Hammerman Ikon

Hammerman Ikon Film Guide

Frenzy
1972
***½
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Jon Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster, Billie Whitelaw, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Vivien Merchant, Michael Bates, Jean Marsh, Clive Swift

Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film is not among his best, but it is an enjoyable and darkly comic thriller about a jobless man who is mistaken for the Necktie Murderer, a serial killer who is terrorising the women of London. Hitchcock shows us the grisly details of the first murder, then inventively lets us imagine the second one. His wicked black humour reaches its low point in the opening minutes with a rape joke and its high point in the second half, when the killer attempts to retrieve incriminating evidence from one of his victims. Based on Arthur La Bern's 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square.