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The tell-tale tic is revealed in the first scene (cf. Losey's Time without Pity), a marital argument culminating in a glimpse of the culprit leaning against the railing of a beachside balcony, so that the churning sea behind him gives a murderously turbulent consciousness. The next morning finds the wife by the shore not drowned but strangled, she was an actress and the suspect is the writer (Derrick De Marney) incriminatingly named in her will. "Contradictory evidence, eh?" Frenzy is at once noticed and there's a flash of The Birds with seagulls in the air, mainly Alfred Hitchcock reprises The 39 Steps with the focus on the teen heroine's inner journey. (From the dinner table full of brothers to the ground literally crumbling under her, the wonders of "an awkward age.") She (Nova Pilbeam) is the daughter of the constable chief (Percy Marmont), more concerned with tracking down the guilty party than the fugitive himself. "Well, it isn't funny, you see?" "No, but I can laugh because I'm innocent." Hideout in the abandoned mill, brawl at the roadside tavern, detour at the children's birthday party for a bit of blind man's buff. Inspired sketches along the way—the absent-minded solicitor (J.H. Roberts), the impish uncle (Basil Radford), the querulous old vagabond who feels "like a shy bride" (Edward Rigby). Hitchcock's most virtuosic passage unmasks the real killer with a sprawling crane across a ballroom to the orchestra drummer, from extreme long shot to extreme close-up. "Seen anyone with a twitch yet?" Welles in The Lady from Shanghai remembers the madcap escape from the courtroom, the police officers in the cart with pigs go into Craven's The Last House on the Left. With Mary Clare, John Longden, George Curzon, Pamela Carme, and George Merritt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |