Frenzy (1972)

Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy is a 1972 British thriller about a necktie murderer, a wronged ex-RAF man, and the Covent Garden produce market. It is based on Arthur La Bern's novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, and it moves with the grim efficiency of a master who has returned to familiar ground: an innocent man accused, a city indifferent to his plight, and a killer hiding in plain sight. The film's pleasures are procedural and macabre. The film's politics, such as they are, belong to another era entirely.

On the question of modern social consciousness, the cupboard is bare. The cast is white British, and the film makes no gesture toward representation as a value. Women exist to be victimized, discussed, or mourned, and the screenplay offers no feminist counterargument to the men who brutalize them. Race is not a subject. LGBTQ lives are not acknowledged. The environment is not a concern, unless we count potatoes as a climate issue, which we do not. Capitalism is not indicted. Covent Garden is simply a market, not a metaphor for exploitation. Body positivity does not enter the frame, and the camera regards bodies as sites of violence or desire, not affirmation.

The killer's pathology is presented as sexual deviance and criminal cruelty, not as neurodivergence requiring accommodation. History is not revised; it is a fictional crime story with period texture. The film has no sermon to deliver, no lecture to append, no moral instruction beyond the old suspense mechanics. It is a nasty, well-made entertainment from a director near the end of his career. We can classify it with confidence: a product of 1972, untouched by the cultural fixations that would arrive decades later. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it repays that attention with craft.