Frenzy

Today, I want to talk about the penultimate film of my favorite director. Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. This film is available on DVD and will be soon on Blu-Ray, I'm sure. An excellent source of information is, of course, the excellent documentary of the also excellent Laurent Bouzereau: The story of 'Frenzy'.

However, two elements of this film are lost: an outtake which, to my knowledge, never resurfaced since post-production and Henry Mancini's music.

The scene I mean takes place after Babs and Blaney go to the hotel. In it, Robert Rusk chases a scared semi-nude woman who is running out of her apartment. Rusk runs into a policeman and even jokes with him that he cannot take off his tie without scaring girls. The script for scene number 52 can be found on Steven DeRosa's website.


On the only picture that remains of the scene is Margaret Nolan (nowhere to be seen in the final cut) chased by Barry Foster whose tie is already untied as she clutches her clothes to cover herself.

The choice of the actress seems to indicate that Hitchcock probably wanted more glamor (the women of Frenzy are quite ordinary looking) and wanted to keep the possibility of undressing the actress. In fact, it's not difficult to find "artistic" pictures of the young lady on the internet: she was also a model and was camera shy in the nude, as opposed to Barbara Leigh-Hunt who demanded a double for the close up of a breast and to Anna Massey who, as she freely admitted, was never planned to appear herself in the potatoes bag sequence or the hotel scene.






But Margaret Nolan is more famous for her appearance in Goldfinger: she is Sean Connery's masseuse. A massage is not the only favor she did James Bond. She is the one you can admire in the nude, painted gold on posters or other products. In the film actress Shirley Eaton plays the part of golden victim Jill Masterson, but it is Margaret who shows off for publicity and the main title sequence.

Now to the music. The composer of Frenzy is Ron Goodwin. But that wasn't always the case. In fact, since his break-up with assigned composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock had changed collaborator for each new production with more or less success. For this film, the music was to be composed by Henri Mancini whose work you've heard in The Pink Panther, Charade, Breakfast At Tyffanny's, and even Disney's The Great Mouse Detective... Maybe he was chosen because of  his work on the excellent "à la Hitchcock" thriller of Terence Young : Wait Until Dark, where Audrey Hepburn is blind and must confront evil-doers who broke in into her house.

In any case, Mancini later complained about not having the same advantages his successor had: the master's recommendations. When Hitchcock expected an upbeat grandiose music for his main title sequence, the musician presented him with a dark and menacing theme. He got fired. but the music wasn't just composed. It was apparently at least partially recorded and more importantly, preserved. In fact you can hear a fragment of te main title cue in Laurent Bouzereau's documentary which implies that he found the original soundtrack.




I compared: he did not used Mancini 's own re-recording for his CD "Mancini in Surround". So we can hope for a release of the original tracks.





One final bit of trivia: Susan Travers, who plays the murderer's final victim, wasn't hired by Hitchcock by chance. She happens to be the daughter of Linden Travers who played Mrs Todhunter in his 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes.
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That's all for today folks!