Now that's an interesting story, EC. Especially given Wasserman's friendship with Ronald Reagan, but then Times Change and Lew might have been, ancestrally, a Democrat, then a Republican. Who knows? Or he could have played on both teams. More likely, he was drawn to powerful politicians.
As to the sex crime stuff in Frenzy, I think it was too Out There for the America of the time in which the film was made, and especially in its planning stages. I'm talkin, not the Age Of Aquarious but the Age Of Charlie Manson. The U.S. was in PTSD mode: first the JFK assassination; then Vietnam; after that, the Civil Rights movement and race problems generally; then the increasingly rebellious and increasingly Left leaning Counterculture and all that entailed (sex, drugs, rock and roll, el al).
In the wake of all the assassinations, I mean from not just JFK and Bobby but George Lincoln Rockwell and Malcolm X, and then MLK. Then the bizarre stuff, whether little green men abducting a New Hampshire couple in their spaceship to the rise of interest in witchcraft, the paranormal and other such things one didn't associate with Middle America, but there it was. Weird crime, too, from the Boston Strangler to the Texas Tower killer to Kitty Genovese.
So, yeah, I think that LBJ got some good advice. That Frenzy was so British made it feel exotic more than creepy. It was like an updated Ripper story. Grisly and yet somehow entertaining. Even Americans embraced it (with reservations), making it the last Hitchcock moneymaker, if not a huge hit in the big scheme of things. It brought "old Alf" back, made him (modestly) bankable; and for a while there he was back in the public eye.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
Now that's an interesting story, EC. Especially given Wasserman's friendship with Ronald Reagan, but then Times Change and Lew might have been, ancestrally, a Democrat, then a Republican. Who knows? Or he could have played on both teams. More likely, he was drawn to powerful politicians.
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I think it was that he was drawn to powerful politicians in general, but for whatever reasons, Uncle Lew really got a connection with LBJ. You will recall that Jack Valenti, the head of the first MPAA "with the R rating," was an LBJ official first. Wasserman "seduced" Valenti to head the MPAA, and Valenti responded, "I will on one condition: that you(Wasserman) personally attend most board meetings."
Anyway it is in the MacGilligan Hitchcock biography that the LBJ/First Frenzy tale comes up. Evidently, even though Wasserman had helped Hitchcock overpower Paramount into making Psycho, Wasserman (for all of Psycho's profit!) didn't want as distasteful a Hitchcock movie being made at Universal! I think Hitchcock got around this by adding the sexual nature of Marnie and the gory murder into Torn Curtain(Wasserman pushed for Torn Curtain with Newman and Andrews as big stars; Hitchcock gave back a downer with a brutal murder as its centerpiece, not a crop duster like action scene.)
More weirdly, MacGilligan contends that once Hitchcock switched to a BRITISH sex psycho in the final Frenzy, Wasserman was even more mollified than if he had been an American sex psycho.
I'm not much sure about this story at all. What IS true, I think, is that Hitchcock after The Birds had box office and critical disappointments with Marnie, Torn Curtain, and Topaz(a melodrama and two spy dramas) so Wasserman gave Hitchcock a greenlight to make "another psycho movie." But WHAT a psycho movie Hitchcock delivered. No "BOO!" factor. Plenty of style, some great set-pieces, but an emphasis on sexual predation that was very uncomfortable to watch, no fun at all.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
As to the sex crime stuff in Frenzy, I think it was too Out There for the America of the time in which the film was made, and especially in its planning stages. I'm talkin, not the Age Of Aquarious but the Age Of Charlie Manson. The U.S. was in PTSD mode: first the JFK assassination; then Vietnam; after that, the Civil Rights movement and race problems generally; then the increasingly rebellious and increasingly Left leaning Counterculture and all that entailed (sex, drugs, rock and roll, el al).
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Yes, it was a very tenuous period. Though "Rosemary's Baby" fit the times (and came out of a younger generation of filmmakers led by, ironically, Roman Polanski), I don't think Wasserman would have approved that either.
So you find the pressure from Wasserman on Hitchcock to make a "glamourous spy movie with big stars" and he delivers Torn Curtain. Later, Hitchcock found the bestseller Topaz in Universal's bare cupboard of owned properties. He said he did that one as a favor to Wasserman, but I always felt its emphasis on French protagonists was a nod in Truffaut's direction. In any event, Hitchcock ended up with two back-to-back Cold War spy films that - despite great style and intelligence in each of them, says I -- seemed to connect with no one. And the second one was starless.
Frenzy arrived almost as an antidote to the blah aspects of the Cold War films, it was, wrote one critic, "a sly and savage movie." That's about right.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
So, yeah, I think that LBJ got some good advice.
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Well, what was key was that, by the time Frenzy arrived in all its R-rated glory in 1972, it had a lot of perverse company. The R rating arrived in late 1968, which meant that R rated movies weren't really in the pipeline until 1970 and after (less some starters like "The Wild Bunch"). 1971 and 1972 saw the sexual violence of Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, and Deliverance("men's division.") Again, Frenzy fit right in.
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That Frenzy was so British made it feel exotic more than creepy.
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It also makes it a nifty "bookend" to the All-American Psycho. Plus, London is just such an older and historic city than the Western locales of Psycho.
And: the film emphasized such British things as pubs(there is one main pub in the story, plus a key scene in a pub down the block from it -- pubs are about one a block in London!) and , immortally, Covent Garden. In retrospect, there was something classic about how Hitchcock "used" Covent Garden, with its swarm of workers going to and fro like ants -- and food everywhere. Hitchcock told Truffaut years before Frenzy that he wanted to make a movie about food -- from fresh from the garden to sewage -- and Frenzy is kind of it. But there is even more atmosphere to Covent Garden in Frenzy: how Rusk disguises himself as a worker bee to dump a victim's body(clad in a potato sack) in a truck; how a worker bee covers a camera switch from inside a building to outside a building; how Rusk himself(the sex psycho) plies his food trade in the marketplace("Don't squeeze the goods til they're yours.") Marvelous.
This is how a movie rises above the norm, if not to full classic status.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
It was like an updated Ripper story. Grisly and yet somehow entertaining.
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You'd be surprised at how many positive reviews called it "fun." Even with a graphic sex killing as its centerpiece. Life's Richard Schickel wrote, "it shows how a great master entertainer can entertain."
Oh, I guess so. I suppose the issue is that 90% of Frenzy is NOT that horrible rape-murder, and what's everywhere else is at once comic(the Oxford dinners) and stylish(the second rape-murder in the film, not shown at all but represented in a poignant reverse track from a closed door down a staircase.) And the rape-murder is powerful enough to make the entertainment value of Frenzy ..."serious, not friovolous."
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Even Americans embraced it (with reservations), making it the last Hitchcock moneymaker, if not a huge hit in the big scheme of things. It brought "old Alf" back, made him (modestly) bankable; and for a while there he was back in the public eye.
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Its weird. Frenzy was clearly a big, big CRITICAL hit (almost 90% raves, all raving about a comeback -- "Return of Alfred The Great"), but not necessarily a box office blockbuster on the order of Psycho, and -- we can only guess -- not really a movie that most audiences truly "enjoyed"(as they had North by Northwest from Hitchcock, and The Sting a year after Frenzy, from Universal, as examples of REAL hits.)
In the "who knows?" world of Hitchcock scholarship, some writers posted Frenzy's earnings at $16 million and "Hitchcock's second-biggest money maker after Psycho." I expect there are some inflation adjusted issues here and that Frenzy is well behind Psycho, NXNW, Rear Window, The Birds as an earner. But it seems to have tripled its $3 million cost, and sold to ABC for $2 million for (bowdlerdized) TV showings.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
What I do remember warmly as a youhg Hitchcock fan was those rave reviews, and how "my man Hitchcock" DID comeback in that summer of '72, making the triumphant rounds of TV shows(Dick Cavett gave him a whole 90 minute interview) and magazine interviews. "Near the end" Hitchcock was on top again. I remember my pride and excitement. I remember thinking it was weird to have that pride and excitement about a movie as small and sick as Frenzy, but...oh well, it WAS 1972, after all.
I note, telegonus, that we have "veered off" on a thread about Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and "rooting for bad guys," but this actually DOES fit Frenzy. For Frenzy's R rating allowed not only "sex and violence" but a kind of perverse "rooting for the bad guy" when we accompany sex psycho Bob Rusk on his quest to retrieve an incriminating tie-pin from the grip of his latest dead victim(in a potato truck bed, no less.) This kind of "rooting for the bad guy" is perverse. He's not bank robbers Steve McQueen or Walter Matthau or con men Newman and Redford against the mob; he's a sex killer of women. Hence -- we are NOT really rooting for him to win at all, we are just weirdly understanding of his task.
But this: Like Norman Bates in Psycho, Bob Rusk in Frenzy is a "nice guy" -- on the surface, and that's another Hitchcock point: our worst killers can be surface great guys. And handsome("Otherwise," said Hitchcock, "they couldn't get near their victims.")
Still, Frenzy could not have been made in the 40s or 50's or pre-R 60s, it is of that "bad guy heroes" period of the 70's. Except THIS bad guy is no way a hero....
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