To be frank, Frenzy is not my favorite film. Point in fact, I don’t like it much at all, and my cohort Alexandra feels the same. My own reasons have a lot to do with an exceedingly unlikeable cast of characters and a pitch black sense of humor.

A director has to be ruthless when it comes to editing their own film. Some directors (Cimino, Coppola and Peckinpah come to mind) are intensely focused on every cut made, turning the editing process into a grueling showdown between editor and director as their films soar over budget and over schedule.

Manipulation and impulsivity are two major guiding forces in the psychopathic mind. Bob Rusk as the killer in Frenzy is a well-crafted example. Many films mangle mental illness to suit the plot. Some even invent diagnoses for this purpose. But Hitchcock hits the mark perfectly with this portrayal of a psychopath.

There are a host of small coincidences in trying to assess whether or not Frenzy is Hitchcock’s response to giallo. Frenzy was of course shot in London, adding the European flair that helped so many giallo seem worldly and exotic to foreign audiences. In my research, I can find little evidence that Hitchcock commented publicly on his disdain for giallo, but reading the film against conventions of the genre, it seems Frenzy is as close to his cinematic response as we might come.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and by 1972, Hitchcock had seen more than his share of flattery. 1963′s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, from director Mario Bava, is widely recognized as the first in a long string of films that would come to be known as “giallo”, a name taken from Italian translations of famous English mystery novels.

The tracking shot has long been one of Hollywood’s most revered cinematic conventions. Audiences can’t get enough of them, and directors seem to have a secret rivalry for who can make the longest, most logistically impossible one. Often the emphasis, the impact the director had intended for audiences, gets lost in the discussion. Increasingly in the modern era, tracking shots are constructed without purpose. They’re a bit of cinematic fluff intended to add to the visual haze, meant to cloud a well worn narrative. For Hitchcock, tracking shots were all about his audience and how he could manipulate their fear and desires to project themselves into his films.

Alfred Hitchcock seemingly had a love/hate relationship with food throughout his life. Hitch, known for his rotund profile and voracious appetite, also dieted off and on with varying degrees of success. The topic inspired his cameo in a weight loss advertisement for 1944′s Lifeboat, after a particularly successful go at shedding the pounds.

You might have seen this one coming. It’s difficult to spend a lot of time talking about filmmaking without bumping up against the formidable career of Alfred Hitchcock. We’ve considered doing a Hitchcock film from the inception of The Film League, the question was always just which one it might be. In the end, we chose Hitch’s penultimate film Frenzy because it seems to be one of the most undervalued of all his successful thrillers. At the same time, the film represents Hitchcock’s career put through a duck press.