Film: FRENZY

We're delving toward the bottom of the Hitchcock barrel as represented by our our boxed set. Last night's viewing was his second to last picture, 1972's Frenzy.

I'm biased against it because I have a visceral aversion to the color and style pallete of the studios from about the mid 60's through the mid 70's. The waxed bonnets of hair, the muddy browns, the pea greens, the courduroy, it all reeks of a wretched era best forgotten.

But in this case, the old-fashioned virtues of Hitchcock's storytelling carry the day...I was able to enjoy the proceedings in spite of the hair, wardrobe, set design and some seemingly arbitrary casting. Hitchcock went back to his roots with this fairly straightforward suspense tale about a wrongly accused man and the serial sex murderer who framed him. A cut above run of the mill late career fare like Topaz, Marnie & Torn Curtain....it's not quite The Birds, but makes a game effort.

Something I've noticed about Hitchcock after watching a huge slab of his films in a compressed time frame- the simpler the story, the better the movie. When you think of Hitchcock you tend to think of these elaborate, labrynthine constructs, the kind of thing critics have in mind when hang that albatross of description "Hitchcockian" arond the neck of some new thriller.

But the complexity in his best movies is in the construction of the film, not the story. The more complex the plot, the more exposition it requires and the less room Hitchcock has to exercise his prodigious command of pure cinema...Topaz is the perfect example of this. Hitchcock spends so much time telling the convoluted international spy story that there's no room left for anything else, and you get a movie anyone could have made.

The only one left is the only one I remember seeing commercials on TV for, 1976's Family Plot, his last film and one that for YEARS I had confused with Murder by Death, the 1976 comedy starring a declining Truman Capote which, for some obscure reason, I saw in the theater.

To sum up, I've never seen Family Plot even though I thought I had.
I'll report on the results, for those who can't get enough Bax movie minutia.