Potato dust

Frenzy

(1972)

The Master's last great film was, I believe, the first I ever saw, and certainly the only one I saw in the theater as a new release; I would have been 18, barely old enough to get in, unless it took from June to December to reach the hinterlands. (I recall seeing it in Beardstown, Ill., about 20 miles east of my even dinkier hometown--though the way memory works, who knows whether that recollection is accurate?)

It is apparently far from unanimous that this is a great film, but come on: an intricately turned wrong-man plot, in which even we have a brief reason to suspect the one against whom all the evidence is piled, a cranky so-and-so who does his best to be his own worst enemy; a magnificently tense scene in which we are fully invested in the completely unsympathetic killer's success in performing the grotesquely horrible and irresistibly hilarious gymnastics necessary to retrieve a piece of incriminating evidence; a delightfully irrelevant subplot involving the chief inspector's domestic challenges; sumptuous location shooting in Hitchcock's return to London; and a rival for "Nobody's perfect" in the annals of great final lines. What more do you want?

And thus ends my roughly 15 months' frenzy of Hitchcock screening. Some revelations, some welcome reacquaintances, and only a few stinkers.