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After a decade of disappointing film ventures and less than sensational critical responses following The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock returned to his native Great Britain in 1972 to direct his final masterpiece Frenzy. Adapted by popular playwright Anthony Shaffer from a novel by Arthur La Bern, Frenzy became arguably Hitchcock’s most explicitly violent film.

Using mostly an ensemble of excellent English stage actors for his cast, Hitchcock downplays the glitz of his most recent Hollywood productions. Frenzy tells the tale of a modern day serial killer, known as the “necktie murderer”. The thriller concerns a down on his luck, recently fired Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), who through terrible coincidences becomes wrongly accused of being the killer when his ex-wife is found strangled in her office.

While not a typical Hitchcock star/romantic hero, like Cary Grant or James Stewart, Finch is effectively believable in a simple everyman manner. Hitchcock fills this tale of the “innocent man on the run” with dark humor and his typical visual suspense. One classic sequence begins after the killer lures a victim up to his Covent Garden flat and Hitchcock tracks silently and eerily back down the stairs and into the street. This same sequence later concludes in the back of a vegetable truck as the killer frantically searches through a potato sack trying to pry a revealing bit of evidence from his dead victim’s fingers.

Rounding off the film’s fine British cast, Barry Foster co-stars as Blaney’s slick friend Bob Rusk, Barbara Leigh-Hunt is Blaney’s ex-wife and Anna Massey, Blaney’s faithful lover. Frenzy was Hitchcock’s second to last film, before his disappointing swan song The Family Plot, but his return to his homeland in the ‘70s created a tense, classic suspense thriller.