David-117 Reviews

Frenzy (1972)

A tired effort from Hitchcock

[1 June 1999]

Alfred Hitchcock was years ahead of his time. His willingness to experiment with new techniques and his ability to use them successfully made him one of the greatest and most innovative directors of all time. For a filmmaker with these qualities, it is amazing to see his name in the credits for this film.

`Frenzy', Hitchcock's penultimate film, is astonishingly naive in both its style and its delivery. It shows London and its citizens in the most stereotypical way imaginable and it therefore bears a strong resemblance to some of the lesser British thrillers of the forties and fifties. As a result, Hitchcock has made a film that it is years BEHIND it's time, it's style being very similar to that of `Blackmail' which he made over forty years earlier. Perhaps the primary fault with this film is that it is clearly full of itself purely because of who it's director is. This is made obvious by the opening credits where Hitchcock's name seems to be up on the screen for an eternity.

After the disappointments of `Torn Curtain' and `Topaz', `Frenzy' was hailed as a spectacular return to form for Hitchcock. What would be closer to the truth would be to say that this film is a sad relapse to the style of his earliest films and looks totally out of place when set in the early seventies.

The Passenger (1975)

A haunting and unique film from Antonioni

[8/10 · 10 May 1999]

One of Jack Nicholson's best but also least known films, `The Passenger' or `Professione: Reporter' is a haunting examination of the desire to escape and start afresh and is without doubt Antonioni's best English language film, eclipsing both `Blowup' and `Zabriskie Point'. Nicholson's role as a world-weary television journalist (David Locke) isn't a particularly demanding one but it is fascinating to see him give a performance so different from anything else we have seen from him and one which is much better than the horny little devil efforts he has sadly specialised in since `One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.

Some may find the opening twenty minutes of the film, where there is virtually no dialogue, hard-going but this perfectly illustrates the sparse and confusing environment of the North African desert where the film begins. We are also treated to a marvellous scene between Locke and the man whose identity he later assumes where a tape recording and flashback are ingeniously merged into one and then separated again. Antonioni creates a mood that is almost indefinable throughout, a kind of hollow detachment which is exactly the perspective that Locke has on the world which has gradually worn him down yet the director still manages to conjure up power and simple romance between Locke and the girl he meets who is played by Maria Schneider. The film was not a hit at the box-office which is not surprising considering it's uncommercial style but artistically and cinematically it is a triumph of innovation.