Parents' Guide to Frenzy

For a modern audience, Frenzy impresses as another example of expert Hitchockian terror and humor, but it disappoints in many particulars. When the killer, a smarmy snake, frames an alcoholic hothead, it's hard to care much about the hothead. He's innocent of the crimes, but he is so unlikable that it feels as if putting him in jail would be a public service. A superficial presentation of two-bit psychology—mostly uninformed generalities about what psychopaths are and aren't—is offered up by everyone from two twits chatting at a bar to smug police officers who are always ten steps behind the killer. The movie lingers far too long on the chief detective's wife's awful cooking, her dreary dishes presented as the entrees to the dessert—the wife's superior insights into the case.

As is often the case in Hitchcock films, women are denigrated throughout, then demonstrate how underestimated they are as they solve crimes through "women's intuition." This is the aging Hitchcock's second to last film and although he still wields the sly humor as carefully as the suspenseful plot points, the film seems less well-judged in both casting and in the reading of the changing attitudes about women and the criminal mind. This is probably forgivable in a man who had been directing movies since the 1920s. But while he was so adept at manipulating our emotions in such films as Psycho, Rear Window, Rope, and Strangers on a Train, here he merely disgusts us with an oily killer, a step or two down from his previous work. In the end, this feels like Hitchcock took this script and a bunch of actors less to enrapture us in a story about something than to privately and for his own amusement work out some puzzle known only to him. For those looking for the director's cameo, he's in a crowd scene, wearing a bowler hat in the early minutes of the movie.