The first thing I saw on my DVD was a large MPAA "Rated R" card. And boy, is it. This is the most explicitly violent movie I've ever seen from Hitchcock (I believe it is his only R-Rated film), and the psychological and sexual violence that he portrays is pretty shocking, even today.
We shouldn't be surprised, though; this was ten years after "Psycho", and even before that, Hitchcock had never been shy about pushing the limits of what was acceptable on screen. The limits were just a lot higher now, that's all. Also consistent with his past work were the bizarre touches of sick humor. They seem kind of awkward now, maybe because we've seen so many films in which this sort of explicit violence is played completely straight, but they make sense in terms of Hitchcock's style.
It would be a mistake, though, to consider this film simply a historical curiosity or an example of "extreme Hitchcock". This is the work of a mature artist fully in command of his medium. Hitchcock is out to shock, and shock he does in a rape/murder scene that's as harrowing as anything coming out of "New Hollywood" at the time, then shows the young turks how it's done the next time the serial killer strikes, in a virtuoso sequence that doesn't allow us to see or hear a single second of the second attack but still manages to be almost as upsetting as the first.
This film really underscores how much the modern "thriller/horror" genre owes to Hitchcock. His entire body of work laid the foundations for the modern thriller, and in "Frenzy", we see that he was fully capable of keeping up with modern trends, if not staying ahead of the curve: the way he reveals the killer's identity early on is reminiscent of much more recent films like "The Silence of the Lambs".
We shouldn't be surprised, though; this was ten years after "Psycho", and even before that, Hitchcock had never been shy about pushing the limits of what was acceptable on screen. The limits were just a lot higher now, that's all. Also consistent with his past work were the bizarre touches of sick humor. They seem kind of awkward now, maybe because we've seen so many films in which this sort of explicit violence is played completely straight, but they make sense in terms of Hitchcock's style.
It would be a mistake, though, to consider this film simply a historical curiosity or an example of "extreme Hitchcock". This is the work of a mature artist fully in command of his medium. Hitchcock is out to shock, and shock he does in a rape/murder scene that's as harrowing as anything coming out of "New Hollywood" at the time, then shows the young turks how it's done the next time the serial killer strikes, in a virtuoso sequence that doesn't allow us to see or hear a single second of the second attack but still manages to be almost as upsetting as the first.
This film really underscores how much the modern "thriller/horror" genre owes to Hitchcock. His entire body of work laid the foundations for the modern thriller, and in "Frenzy", we see that he was fully capable of keeping up with modern trends, if not staying ahead of the curve: the way he reveals the killer's identity early on is reminiscent of much more recent films like "The Silence of the Lambs".