Frenzy
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Frenzy |
| Original title | Frenzy |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1972 |
| length | 116 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Alfred Hitchcock |
| script | Anthony Shaffer |
| production | Alfred Hitchcock |
| music | Ron Goodwin |
| camera |
Gilbert Taylor , Leonard J. South |
| cut | John Jympson |
| occupation | |
| |
Frenzy (to German madness, madness) is a British thriller by Alfred Hitchcock in the year 1972 based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern . It was the first film that Hitchcock has made back in his native England since 1950. An innocent man is suspected of being a feverishly wanted serial killer who strangles his victim with a tie.
action
A politician speaks to Parliament on the banks of the Thames about pollution. One of the listeners discovered a naked female corpse in the river with a tie tied around her neck - not the first so strangled in London.
Former Royal Air Force pilot and squadron leader Richard Blaney has suffered a social crash. He works as a bartender , is accused of theft by the bar owner and fired. Blaney pays the landlord an advance, accepts the expulsion and is now almost broke. The fruit dealer Bob Rusk gives him a tip for a horse bet. However, he refuses Rusk's offer to help him out with money. Instead, Blaney goes to a bar for a drink. As he found out a little later from Rusk, his tip - 20: 1 - was spot on.
Then he visits his ex-wife Brenda, who runs a successful dating agency. She and Blaney have been divorced for two years. On the advice of the lawyers, mental and physical cruelty was given as grounds for divorce. Brenda surprisingly gives her secretary time off so she can be undisturbed with her ex-husband. The quick-tempered Blaney loudly vented the anger over his supposedly unjust fate. Brenda wants to give him money, but he refuses. She then invites him to dinner at her club that evening. There, too, Blaney behaves aggressively and breaks a glass. When they split up shortly afterwards, he doesn't notice that Brenda is giving him money. He stays in a men's pension of the Salvation Army , where one of his bedmates tries to steal from him. Only now does he notice the money being slipped.
The following day, the fruit dealer Rusk waits for Brenda's secretary to take a lunch break to break into the marriage agency. After a humiliating conversation, he assaults Brenda and finally strangles her with his tie. Then he leaves the agency unnoticed. Shortly afterwards, when Blaney wants to thank his wife for the money, he finds the door to the office locked and leaves the house. The secretary sees him coming back from her lunch break. When she finds her boss murdered, she thinks Blaney is the tie killer and reports this to the police.
Blaney meets with Babs Milligan, who works in the pub where he worked. Take a taxi to the “Coburg” hotel. Blaney gives his foul-smelling leather-trimmed suit to the porter for cleaning. The couple spends the night under a false name in the "Cupid Room". The next morning the porter reads in the newspaper that the tie killer had strangled the owner of a marriage agency. A man with a leather jacket is suspected. The doorman calls the police. But the couple has also read the newspaper and has already left the hotel. The two consulted on a bench in a small park. An old comrade from the Royal Air Force, Johnny Porter, accidentally discovers Blaney there and takes him and Babs home. Johnny's wife Hetty is not very enthusiastic about the surprise guests. Since the Porters are planning a trip to Paris, Porter suggests that Blaney and Babs just come along. He's opening an English pub there, so both of them can work. Blaney Babs succeeds in persuading them to try it together in Paris. They arrange to meet at the train station the next day. Babs goes to her place of work. The landlord, who heard of the rumors, also quits her and throws her out of her room. When she storms out of the pub, she meets Bob Rusk. He offers her that she can stay in his apartment for now because he is absent.
The following night, Rusk secretly takes a heavy sack to a truck loaded with potatoes in a cart. In the sack is the body of Babs, which Rusk also strangled. He hides them between the filled jute sacks. When he is back in his apartment, he notices that his tie pin is missing, which could lead to his trail through the diamond-studded emblem. It must be in the corpse's hand. He is desperately trying to find the right sack on the back of the truck when the truck starts moving. When Rusk has finally found what he is looking for, he has to break the rigid fingers of the victim to get to the needle. When he stops at a rest stop, he jumps off the car. The truck continues later, but now loses part of its load because the drop side has been folded down. A police car starts chasing and almost catches the murdered woman naked as she falls onto the street.
When the murder of Babs becomes known, an argument breaks out between Blaney and his former aviator. He could give him an alibi, but fails to do so because his wife doesn't want to get into trouble. Now wanted as a murderer, Blaney sneaks to Rusk, who offers him a refuge. In truth, Rusk wants to blame Blaney for his crimes. Shortly afterwards, the police that he had notified arrive and arrest Blaney. In his pocket are the clothes of the murdered Babs that Rusk has hidden there. Blaney desperately protests his innocence in the courtroom. When sentenced to life imprisonment, he swears revenge on Rusk.
Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Oxford , who led the investigation, has doubts in the courtroom. The testimony of the strangled Brenda Blaney's secretary, who Rusk thinks is perverted, confirms these doubts. Blaney deliberately falls down a staircase in prison and is bleeding from a wound, whereupon he ends up in a poorly guarded infirmary. From there he escapes at night, steals a car and tries to break into the real murderer's apartment. Equipped with a crowbar, he notices that the door of the apartment is unlocked. When he enters, he sees a head of blond hair in bed and, convinced that it is Rusk, hits him several times. Suddenly Commissioner Oxford appears in the doorway. His own doubts, his wife's dubious culinary skills and intuition, but above all the results of the forensic pathology in Babs Milligan, made him rush to Rusk's apartment. The superintendent notes that Blaney did not hit Rusk, but an already dead blonde. She was also strangled with a tie. When a noise sounds, Oxford Blaney tells him to be very quiet. Then Rusk opens the door, pulls a steamer trunk behind him (without wearing a tie) and is convicted.
Subplot
Hitchcock also built a small, humorous subplot into this film: whenever Oxford comes home in the evening, his dear but naive wife always enthusiastically presents him the results of a cooking course for fine French cuisine . The dishes may, as the viewer may assume, be edible, but not without a disgust factor for Oxford, as the homicide investigator looks at fish heads from a soup after work, for example. A quail that is barely larger than the two blue grapes on the side dish - a parody of "haute cuisine" - is literally mistreated with the cutlery with a disgusted grimace. The chief inspector therefore usually prefers to feast on his original English breakfast in the office, which consists of eggs, sausages and baked ham.
Despite or perhaps because of her naivety, Oxford's wife seems to see through the context of the case her husband is working on. Often she draws the right conclusions, but these are not always obvious to the police officer.
The cut final scene also contains a humorous allusion. Oxford's wife suggests that Richard Blaney be invited to his home for dinner, which leads Oxford to comment: "He will enjoy everything after the prison meal."
background
- In Frenzy, Hitchcock addresses the relationship between food, sex and death. This is expressed in frequent, sometimes quite macabre details. This is how the killer works B. at a fruit and vegetable wholesale market in London, he eats an apple while being raped and hides a corpse in a potato sack. Inspector Oxford is mistreated by his wife with barely edible food while she discusses the details of the murders with him. Among other things, he tells his wife gruesome details about the murderer while reluctantly cutting up a pig's foot. Hitchcock also said he used the same sound effect to brutally break his fingers on the truck as he used the scene in which Oxford's wife breaks a breadstick . Thus the connection between crime and food becomes even clearer.
- Hitchcock chose the courtroom as the prosecution witness as the backdrop for the court scenes .
- The main location of the film is the fruit and vegetable market in the London borough of Covent Garden , the largest of its kind in Great Britain at the time. The colorful picture that Hitchcock drew of the market was a tribute to the London of his childhood days. Hitchcock was aware that with the long-decided move of the market to Nine Elms this image would be lost forever, and so he set a cinematic monument to him.
- Frenzy was the first Hitchcock film to feature nude scenes. However, the two actresses Anna Massey and Barbara Leigh-Hunt were doubled.
- The shooting of the scenes in which Bob Rusk murders the matchmaker Brenda Blaney and later after the second murder searches for his tiepin in a moving van in a potato sack lasted three days each.
- Originally, Henry Mancini was hired for the film music. But after an argument with Hitchcock, he was fired and Ron Goodwin , best known for the soundtrack of the Miss Marple films, took over the job.
- Several actors were dissatisfied with some dialogues, as Hitchcock incorporated many ancient language elements that he knew from his British days, but which no longer corresponded to the current usage of the 1970s. Jon Finch sent comments to Hitchcock's secretary and suggested improvements. Hitchcock wasn't always happy about this, and Finch replied, "Jon, I said you can suggest changes, I didn't say you could rewrite the whole script." Still, one or the other of Finch's suggestions found their way into the final version of the film.
- As part of the promotion, a life-size Hitchcock doll was made, which was floated in the Thames for a trailer, among other things. It was also thought of using this “appearance” as a cameo for the film , but then dropped the idea.
- Cameo: Hitchcock can be seen in the crowd at the beginning of the film. He is the only one not to applaud the speaker. He can be recognized in another scene after the dead body was discovered in the river. He stands with a couple who are discussing Jack the Ripper .
- The pictures of a Chinese woman hanging in Rusk's apartment are by Vladimir Tretchikoff . The model is Monika Sing-Lee.
German dubbed version
The somewhat casual German synchronization typical of the 1970s was created in 1972 in the studios of Berliner Synchron GmbH. The dialogue book was written by Fritz A. Koeniger and Michael Miller directed the dubbing.
| role | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Richard Blaney | Jon Finch | Christian Brückner |
| Chief Inspector Oxford | Alec McCowen | Lothar Blumhagen |
| Robert Rusk | Barry Foster | Rolf Schult |
| Hetty Porter | Billie Whitelaw | Ursula Herwig |
| Brenda Blaney | Barbara Leigh-Hunt | Renate Danz |
| Babs Milligan | Anna Massey | Brigitte Grothum |
| Johnny Porter | Clive Swift | Harry Wüstenhagen |
| Felix Forsythe | Bernard Cribbins | Jochen Schröder |
| Mrs. Oxford | Vivien Merchant | Gudrun Genest |
| Sir George | John Boxer | Erich Fiedler |
| Monica Barling | Jean Marsh | Bettina Schön |
Awards
1973: Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain:
- CEC Award for Best Film (Mejor Pelicula Extranjera) to the United Kingdom
Reviews
“Alfred Hitchcock lets his predilection for Anglo-Saxon irony run free in his late work. A formally extremely carefully and technically perfectly staged thriller with some macabre details. "
“Hitchcock is back at the height of his championship here. Again he deals with his favorite topic: A person loses his 'identity' and is taken for someone he is not. "
media
- DVD: Frenzy - Hitchcock Collection . Universal 903 561 9, anamorphic widescreen (1: 78: 1), 111 min., With making-of , art gallery and cinema trailer, FSK 16
literature
- Arthur La Bern: Frenzy. (OT: Frenzy. / Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. ) Heyne, Munich 1973.
- François Truffaut : Mr. Hitchcock, how did you do it? Heyne, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-453-86141-8 . (Series of interviews (around 50 hours) with the French director from 1962). Original edition: François Truffaut: Le cinéma selon Hitchcock. (German. The film according to Hitchcock. ) Simon and Schuster, 1984, ISBN 0-671-52601-4 .
- Robert A. Harris, Michael S. Lasky, eds. Joe Hembus : Alfred Hitchcock and his films. (OT: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. ) Citadel film book from Goldmann, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-442-10201-4 .
- John Russel Taylor: The Hitchcock Biography. Fischer Cinema 1982, ISBN 3-596-23680-0 .
- Donald Spoto : Alfred Hitchcock - The dark side of genius. Translation by Bodo Fründt. Heyne, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-453-55146-X .
- Bodo Fründt: Alfred Hitchcock and his films. Heyne Film Library Volume 91, 1986, ISBN 3-453-86091-8 .
- Raymond Foery: Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy: The Last Masterpiece. 2012.
- Thilo Wydra : Alfred Hitchcock. Life - work - effect. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010. ISBN 978-3-518-18243-7 .
Web links
- Frenzy in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Sound carrier with the film music
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of Release for Frenzy . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , December 2008 (PDF; test number: 44 658 DVD).
- ^ Thilo Wydra: Alfred Hitchcock. Life, work, activity. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-18243-7 , p. 128.
- ↑ Thomas Bräutigam : Lexicon of film and television synchronization. More than 2000 films and series with their German voice actors etc. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-289-X , p. 147.
- ↑ Arne Kaul's synchronous database ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Frenzy. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Reclams Filmführer, 2.A. 1973, ISBN 3-15-010205-7 .
