FRENZY'S FANFARE

There's a wonderfully tonally incongruous title sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's late career serial killer movie 'Frenzy' (1972) which has all the pomp and ceremony of a great Royal occasion and perhaps in some ways it was; after all, the film represented Hitchcock's first homecoming production on English soil (or asphalt streets) since he left Britain for America in 1939. Ron Goodwin's bright, triumphant sounding score could have just as well been written for a classic Errol Flynn movie such as 'The Sea Hawk' or 'The Adventures Of Robin Hood' than the story of a creepy killer who strangles women with neckties.

The establishing helicopter shot that presents the city of London in all its glory is wonderfully free of any portentous dark and shadow or Saul Bass visual ingenuity and there is absolutely no intimation of the grisly events soon to take place except for perhaps the suggestive title itself, 'Frenzy'. The celebration of the story's key location is certainly more akin to something a tourist board might have sponsored which, in fact, they did as the British Tourist Authority (BTA) happily supported Hitchcock's production as they saw it as being useful in promoting the City of London as a major international tourist destination. You can even see the London Tourist Board logo in the top right hand corner of the frame in the opening shot that reminds me of old fashioned, scenic postcards. Featuring iconic locations of the city such as Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden and the River Thames throughout the film, the opening of 'Frenzy' feels especially patriotically and unabashedly English. It is the cinematic equivalent of a bottle of HP Brown Sauce (which coincidentally has The Houses of Parliament on its famous label).

Perhaps, then, there is no contradiction for the BTA's endorsement of Hitchcock's film as with the city's rich history of having one of the world's most famous criminals 'Jack the Ripper' to its name, London could easily add murder (alongside Hitchcock himself) as one of its most famous exports. The great Leytonstone-born director capitalised on this at the outset of his career, most notably with his 1927 film 'The Lodger' which used the famous 'London fog' to paint the sinister atmospheric tone of his story about a serial woman killer called 'the avenger'. 'Frenzy' is a perfect bookend to his early London films and now shooting in colour as opposed to black and white, 'Hitch' had brought back with him a certain Hollywood slickness from across the pond so that in a sense the 1972 film is a perfect hybrid of early and late Hitchcock, a summation of his entire journey as a director.

So after this tourist board opening for 'Frenzy', the stage is set for both Hitch's love letter to the city and establishes the setting for the first victim of the 'Necktie Murderer' who washes up naked in the lime green waters of the Thames just after a politician Sir George makes a speech at the London Assembly on the Thames embankment to a small crowd made up of the general public and a coterie of press. He vows to clean up London's iconic river and make it clean and unpolluted once more as a symbol of the city's progress post industrialisation. Of course, Hitchcock can't help but muddy the waters (pun intended) as we see a medium close up of the floating corpse of a woman bobbing up and down on the surface of the Thames with a necktie wrapped tight around her neck.

Perhaps it's a reflection of Hitchcock's own twisted psychology that he was at his happiest when making movies about murder. Similarly to Quentin Tarantino, who is often at his most jubilant when staging Mexican stand offs in his films that inevitably lead to bloodbaths, Hitch appears to revel in shooting strangled throats with bulging eyes. I'm convinced both of these two directors would have been serial killers themselves had they not become film directors.

And if murder was Hitch's primary inspiration for making movies, then London surely must have been his second. The psychology of the city seems to have entrenched itself inside his psyche so that he was as much shaped by his environment as he was by its atmosphere of crime that lurked in the smog and soot of the place and its streets when he was growing up as a young boy.

Certainly as a promotional tool for London, 'Frenzy' has a unique, if lurid charm.