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Rusk On the Couch, Drinking His Brandy

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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To the extent that Frenzy is famous at all, it is for three scenes:

The rape-murder of Brenda Blaney in her office.
The entirely non-violent "Farewell to Babs" shot backwards down the stairs after Rusk takes her into his flat to her death.
"The Potato Truck Scene" -- in which Rusk, hidden in the back of a moving truck filled with potatoes, ransacks the potato sack with Babs' body in it, seeking the tiepin in her dead grasp.

"The Potato Truck Scene" is one of those scenes that begs a bit of a question:

When does it start? With what shot?

I would submit that the scene actually starts with the last shot -- and last line -- of the scene right before it: Inspector Oxford having dinner with his wife.

Oxford says: "We must find the killer before his appetite is whetted again."

CUT TO:

Night. The door of a London apartment house opens, and a worker emerges in apron and cap, pushing a wheelbarrow with a lumpy sack of potatoes on it. He stops to look around suspiciously, framed perfectly by the steel spikes common to London buildings. The sound effects are perfect, as we HEAR the creaking cracking of the wooden wheelbarrow and its wheels.

Its a great shot, with great "flavorful" sounds, and it means something as we connect the image to our minds: That's not just some Covent Garden worker. That's Bob Rusk, who we now know to be the Necktie Strangler. And that's not a sack of potatoes. That's a sack of Babs Milligan! (When last we saw her, she was entering Rusk's flat to her doom.) Its a superfast moment that matches the macabre and the profoundly sad.

There follows great Hitchcockian shots: a high angle matte shot of Rusk pushing the wheelbarrow across the street to a waiting row of skull-faced , parked trucks. The London skyline at night. Medium shots of Rusk finding the potato truck and heaving the too-heavy Babs sack into the back of the truck. Energetic close-ups of Rusk tossing the apron away and the cap into another truck, and becoming Bob Rusk again. Then a shot of his entering his apartment building(it matches the shot where he brought out the wheelbarrow and anticipates a shot to come soon of him running back out to the trucks.

And then Rusk enters his flat...

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And then Rusk enters his flat...

...and proceeds to lie on his couch, to relax, and to pour himself a brandy from the table next to the couch.

We are still early on in the "potato truck sequence"(and we aren't in or near the potato truck at this point!), but I've always remembered this moment in which Rusk reclines and relaxes on his couch.

Because, from the standpoint of us as audience members, we are privy to something unnerving here: watching a serial killer at rest, relaxing after the hard labors of raping and killing an innocent victim and disposing of her body as he has with other victims. We're looking at nothing more than a man at rest -- but when we THINK about it -- its horrifying. He's like a lion sated after killing and eating a gazelle.

I'm also reminded that in Hitchcock's more famous "Psycho," we also spent a lot of time just watching Norman Bates hang out and do things(clean up a dead body, sink a car in a swamp, carry his mother downstairs), but we didn't KNOW Bates was the psycho killer at those points in the picture. With Rusk, we know exactly who and what we are looking at: a madman.

In the novel from which Frenzy was taken, author Arthur LaBern gives us Rusk's inner thoughts as he lies on the couch, and they are horrifying: he is remembering the "pleasure" of his last sexual kill. I expect that perhaps Hitchcock gave actor Barry Foster instructions to think about this as he lay on the couch.

Rusk rises from the couch to go to his window -- which is blocked with thick heavy red curtains(all the better to hide his murders in this room from witnesses outside) -- and we get a great POV shot of that same flavorful London skyline and row of trucks -- Rusk is waiting to see if the potato truck has driven away yet. It hasn't.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Rusk moves from the window into a close-up, reaching to his lapel to grab the tiepin to pick his teeth -- a gesture we have seen before, Hitch has prepared us for this -- and: there's no tiepin on his lapel. No Rusk goes into a panic -- or perhaps a frenzy -- as he ransacks his flat for that tiepin. We've all been there -- frantic over something lost, can we ever find it? But then again, we've not been serial killers.

Hitchcock plants a major, sick clue: Rusk opens one of the drawers near his bed and there are Babs' CLOTHES(a distinctive bright orange dress had been planted in our mind.) He ransacks those for the tiepin. No go.

And then he walks into an extreme close-up and BOOM: we get the fragmented flashback to the strangling of Babs Milligan and how with her dying hand she grabbed that tiepin and pulled it into her grasp.

"Christ Al-Bloody Mighty!" roars Rusk, running down the stairs, out the door(same shot as the two before; likely all three filmed at the same time), over to the truck, INTO the back of the truck. And then the truck driver appears and drives the truck away...

...and the "potato truck scene" really begins.

But, I say it began a lot earlier...and that the focal point of the whole thing was Rusk, relaxing on his couch, his work (rape and murder) supposedly done, his appetite sated...