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OT: "Frenzy" Finally Gets a Really Good DVD Cover

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Hitchcock's comeback of 1972, "Frenzy," had a pretty good poster back in its year of release, with the "necktie" motif swirling in concert with the words "HITCHCOCK'S" "FRENZY" and a couple of nice tag lines: "From the master of shock! A shocking masterpiece!" and "A deadly new twist from the original Hitchcock." Cast member Anna Massey's screaming face and head centered the poster, along with a teeny-tiny drawing of Barry Foster as "the Necktie Strangler" (which rather gave the game away -- for the first 30 minutes of the movie, we're supposed to think that Jon Finch is the killer.)

Good enough.

But starting in the 80s with the VHS release of Frenzy, and continuing on into the 90s and 2000's, the "video" poster for Frenzy was pretty subpar IMHO, a combination of dull AND icky: Pretty much just a close-up of Anna Massey screaming...but not looking very attractive at all(Massey wasn't a raving beauty but she didn't look THAT bad.)

"The Anna Massey screaming" Frenzy VHS and DVD posters really made Frenzy look pretty bad in the years of that release.

Efforts were eventually made to shift attention to another element of Frenzy: not the victim(and Massey's murder isn't the really graphic one in Frenzy; Barbara Leigh Hunt's is), but the killer: Barry Foster as Bob Rusk.

After the black-and-white psycho villains of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt(Joseph Cotton as Uncle Charlie), Strangers on a Train(Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony) and Psycho(Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates) Frenzy was finally a Technicolor film and Bob Rusk was a "Technicolor psycho" with a bright thatch of curled butterscotch-red-blond hair atop his head and his muttonshop side burns(it all screamed "1972 hair.")

Foster had been cast because of his resemblance to Michael Caine, who turned the role of Rusk down. But a first attempt to portay Foster on a Frenzy VHS cover made the rather handsome man look instead like...Marty Feldman? (Ugly, bug-eyes.)

Over time, a somewhat better but still rather ugly close-up of Barry Foster landed on a DVD cover but then...

...some years later, the BEST DVD cover to date was put together. No Anna Massey screaming. Rather the TWO leads -- an intense looking Jon Finch, a menacing looking Barry Foster -- were in side by side close-ups with a small drawing of a woman in a bedroom being menaced in between(that artwork was in a 1972 paperback version of Frenzy.) Both Finch and Foster looked handsome -- and we were reminded that, for total unknowns(at the movies) both men had "movie star looks." They COULD have both been stars under some circumstance, but it was not to be(probably Foster looking too much like Caine, you can only have one.)

Well, now in 2022, I've seen yet another new DVD cover for Frenzy, and it is in many ways the best yet:

Barry Foster and Jon Finch still get the cover together -- but Finch's photo is much smaller and in the corner of the frame. Rather, Barry Foster's Bob Rusk is front and center, dominating the cover, well-dressed, suave and menacing -- truly (the years have proven) the true LEAD of Frenzy, just like Perkins was in Psycho and Walker was in Strangers on a Train. (Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt, however, didn't get to dominate Teresa Wright's star power.) Jon Finch , alas and fittingly, must join Farley Granger and John Gavin in taking "second seat" to a Hitchcock psycho.

Along with the emphasis on a handsome, menacing Bob Rusk, the new Frenzy cover spotlights something important: a necktie and Rusk's "R" tiepin (so well used in so many ways throughout the film.) The psycho villain, his weapon of choice, his MacGuffin(the tiepin)...all dominating the poster and eradicating memories of an unattractive version of Anna Massey screaming.

Somebody got it right.

Not to mention: the BIGGEST name on the DVD? Alfred Hitchocck, of course. Still crazy(and important) after all these years.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

This post reminds me that I'm still looking for a copy of the original *short* (just 1 minute long - teaser) trailer for Frenzy (1972) whose transcript is as follows:

Alfred Hitchcock: "I´d like a dozen ties, please"
Tom Helmore (Gavin Elster from Vertigo!): "Yes Sir. Any preference? Stripes, solids. Any particular colours?"
Alfred Hitchcock: "No, I don´t care very much. It´s... They´re for a friend of mine. He uses them to strangle women."
Card: Frenzy
(clips from film) "My god, the tie"
Card: Alfred Hitchcock´s Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock: "Frenzy will get you by the throat."
Card: Coming soon

This trailer was collected on the main Laserdisc for Frenzy, and was for a brief time (in the early 2000s I think) viewable online. Stupidly I didn't save a copy of it then. Nowadays the best that I can do is two framegrabs (and the transcript) from the teaser trailer here:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/feature-articles/hitchcocks_trailers_part2/
If anyone has the teaser trailer or knows where to find it online, or even any additional framegrabs from it, I'd be truly obliged and grateful if they'd post a note about it here.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

This post reminds me that I'm still looking for a copy of the original *short* (just 1 minute long - teaser) trailer for Frenzy (1972) whose transcript is as follows:

Alfred Hitchcock: "I´d like a dozen ties, please"
Tom Helmore (Gavin Elster from Vertigo!): "Yes Sir. Any preference? Stripes, solids. Any particular colours?"
Alfred Hitchcock: "No, I don´t care very much. It´s... They´re for a friend of mine. He uses them to strangle women."
Card: Frenzy
(clips from film) "My god, the tie"
Card: Alfred Hitchcock´s Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock: "Frenzy will get you by the throat."
Card: Coming soon

---

Its a great request, swanstep, and I hope it leads to a successful "get." Keeping parts of movie history alive for storage "somewhere"(your private collection, donation to the Academy?) is a worthwhile pursuit.

I wanted to add some comments as part of my own attempt to "leave a little Hitchcock history behind":

Somebody somewhere sent that trailer out in a chat room I once attended. I recall that the trailer had some sort of 'video time stamp" in the corner, saying something like "for promotional purposes only." What's important here is that this was the first time I saw that teaser since on TV in 1972 and I noticed (a) the salesman was, indeed, Gavin Elster himself!(thus linking Frenzy to Vertigo) and (b) once Hitchcock reveals that he is buying the ties for a friend who is a killer -- the face of the "amiable salesman" darkens knowingly, and supportively. It is as if Bob Rusk has murderous allies in Hitchcock and Gavin Elster. A creepy little final "touch" -- ends the teaser on a grim note.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Meanwhile, back IN 1972, when I first saw the "buying neckties TV commercial" it was in this highly nostalgic context:

When Frenzy came out, I was not living in Los Angeles as I had been a few years before. The city I lived in had limited TV channels and "reach," but one of those few channels was a "local independent" that tended to run TV series re-runs and old movies a lot.

In the summer of 1972, "out of the blue," that local channel ran, each night Monday through Friday at 11:00 pm...episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock HOUR,which was noteable because those were "bigger, longer and somewhat hipper" than the 50's half hour show, and with some more familiar stars.

I made time to watch as many of those Alfred Hitchcock Hours as I could. I was a pretty intense Hitchcock fan at the time and I had not really watched the hours first run when I was younger. These hours were very helpful to my "Hitchcock education" -- including the ONE sole hour that Hitch directed called "I Saw the Whole Thing" which opens with a classic Hitchcock set-piece on TV terms. (Hitch directed quite a few of the earlier half hour shows; his move to only direct one of the hours was , perhaps, an early clue that he would soon discontinue the TV series -- even with high ratings -- and edge into semi retirement.)

Anyway, EACH of those Alfred Hitchcock Hours came equipped with one or two "Frenzy" commercials. One was the one where Hitchcock buys neckties from Gavin Elster. The other was more "generic," but I think Hitchcock still appeared in it (given that Frenzy had no stars, but also given its connections to Psycho and the Psycho trailer -- Hitchcock WAS the star of these commercials.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

What I came to realize was that Universal had elected for the summer of 1972(June, July, August) to ship the Alfred Hitchcock Hour out to local channels WITH Frenzy commercials so as to create "the Hitchcock Frenzy Summer of 1972" -- combining the "old" Hitchcock of only a few years before in the 60's(but how quickly those black-and-white TV years were slipping into the past) with "new" Hitchcock of a Technicolor London Psycho and the R rating.

For a young Hitchcock buff, that 1972 summer was a surprisingly "pro-Hitchcock" time on TV. Still, I felt it was in some ways a failed attempt to bring "the hype of Hitchcock" back when he was simply too old to carry on the same way. It was happy, but a little sad, that "Frenzy" summer of Alfred Hitchcock Hours.

Meanwhile: those neckties. In the book from which Frenzy was taken, the strangler uses his bare hands and in one case, a stocking, to kill. Somebody -- Hitchcock? Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer? -- came up with the idea to make give the killer a "motif" (neckties) and it gave Frenzy a galvanizing central object around which to focus -- in the posters, in those commercials and in the movie itself -- the Necktie Strangler gave himself a PR tool and killed women with a very male article of clothing, leaving it tied around the victims' necks(pre-DNA). Not to mention the strong use of the tiepin as a MacGuffin.

Brilliant. Pure Hitchcock. (And don't get me started on the potatoes.)

I might add that the "Frenzy" summer seemed very much geared towards trying to recreate the publicity blitz that Psycho had had in 1960. Hitchcock had largely stayed out of the trailers for Torn Curtain and Topaz, but he came back on screen to promote Frenzy with a trailer that very much echoed the 1960 Psycho trailer in talking about how ' a very horrible murder took place here." It worked as nostalgia.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

Hitchcock really does seem to have had a second wind of energy for Frenzy and its promotion. Frenzy had big premieres in London and in Cannes. At the latter, Hitchcock looked better/healthier than he had in a while, and was squired around by no less than Grace Kelly. The following page has lots of shots of these events:

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Hitchcock_Gallery:_Frenzy_(1972)

And there was a kind of victory lap of talkshow appearances and other media events in the US, e.g., 90 minutes with Dick Cavett on June 8, 1972. One senses that Hitch knew he at last had something special again with Frenzy, that he'd pulled himself into the Hard-R '70s with some style: a great script, a great new DP, a great gritty, non-starry cast (so *he* was the star), and so on. He'd even been able to look after Alma through her stroke while the film was being made (and she made the Cannes premier too!), so this a story of personal challenges met and ultimate triumph for the Hitchcocks too.