Frenzy

 Considered a return to form for Hitchcock after a few disappointing films, Frenzy is also considered by some as his final masterpiece. In my opinion there are flashes of his old genius, and there are stretches where the movie looks similar to crime thrillers being made by much less distinctive directorws in the 70s. Hitch definiteky took advantage of laxer standards on nudity and violence. In an era where rape was often eroticized in film to a disturbing degree, Hitch made a rape scene that looks similar to those but is comepletely unerotic and in fact quite disturbing. 

The plot of the movie is a familiar one to fans of Hitchcock's older work. A man is suspected of and hunted for crimes he did not commit. In this case, the crimes consist of raping women and strangling them to death with neck ties. One big difference is that unlike Cary Grant's character in North By Northwest, for instance, the protagonist in Frenzy (named Richard Blaney) is an unlikeable jerk. He easily loses his temper. He yells at his ex-wife for no good reason. All this helps to make his misidentification as the killer more believable. The actor playing the actual killer does a great job of basically playing a dual role, seeming friendly and well adjusted when talking to other characters and completely deranged when he's committing his crimes.

It's a bleak movie, and one that doesn't seem to hold a very generous view of people. But even with that, there are moments of dark humor that work quite well, and even a few moments of downright silliness that somehow don't feel out of place. Somehow Hitchcock made a more realistic and violent film about murder, and somehow used it to bring back his playful Alfred Hitchcock Presents sensibility. The story is engaging, and has several interesting twists along the way. The ending feels abrupt, perhaps a result of it's being tacked on to the original ending of the source novel.

One also suspects that maybe some of the shoddier looking scenes were a result of a combination of Hitchcock's age and reputed inability to stay awake on set during his later years, a back injury he suffered during early filming, and his wife's stroke which had him absent during parts of filming with others filling in for him. None the less, this feels much more like some of his earlier movies than just about anything else after Psycho, and in parts even feels equal to them. It's a solid movie, and does not deserve the second tier status it seems to have picked up over the years.