They Don’t Make Trailers Like That Anymore: FRENZY (1972)

Yesterday marked Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday.  Besides being a great director with many remarkable films under his belt, he’s noteworthy for being the only director to really become his own brand.  Others have tried--Spike Lee, Brian dePalma, Quentin Tarantino and Eli Fucking Roth come to mind, and all have had varying degrees of success.  But Hitchcock was able to sell his movies solely on his name and the persona he cultivated in the 50‘s.  He was the centerpiece of the marketing for the later entries in his career.

Which brings us to Frenzy, which in my mind is the last really good film of his career.  It was a bit of a back to basics film for him--shot in his native London with a cast mostly unknown to us Amurricans, it was a return to the ‘Wrong Man’ template that served him so well.  I have memories of seeing this at the Sunrise Drive-In on Long Island, even though I was eight at the time of its release.

The trailer for this film takes full advantage of the grimly comic ghoulishness the audience had learned to love from Hitchcock.  He’s front and center here--notice there’s not a single mention of anyone who’s in the film, and only fleeting glimpses of them in the footage.  It’s basically an extended stand-up routine keyed to the film, complete with a quick reference to one of the most celebrated episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, ‘A Lamb To The Slaughter.’  Make no bones about it--Alfred Hitchcock is the star of Frenzy, and the actors are all incidental.

Trailer courtesy Movie Clips Classic Trailers.