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Frenzy location: the old Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market: now the Covent garden Piazza
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CREDITS
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“We haven't had a good, juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they're so good for the tourist trade. Foreigners somehow expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs and littered with ripped whores, don't you think?”
A queasy collision between Anthony Shaffer’s blackly humorous script and the director’s virulent misogyny, with Alfred Hitchcock, returning to film in London for the first time in many years, seemingly stuck in a thirties time warp.
The first strangled body is found in the Thames alongside County Hall, while a politician blathers on about pollution to an audience including a prurient, bowler-hatted Hitch, but most of the action centres around the old Covent Garden in the days when it was still a thriving fruit and veg market. In the mid-seventies, the market moved to Nine Elms near Vauxhall, and Covent Garden became a prettified tourist trap.
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'Frenzy location: the pub in which Blaney works: The Globe, Bow Street, Covent Garden |
Many of the locations are still recognisable, however. The Globe, Bow Street, the public house from which Blaney (Jon Finch) is sacked from his job as a barman, can still be seen, though it’s been completely renovated. And at the time I took this photograph (November 2006), it was closed and up for rent.
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'Frenzy location: lubricious talk in the pub: The Nell of Old Drury,Catherine Street, Covent Garden |
The pub where Blaney overhears the city gents drooling over the wave of sex killings remains unchanged. It’s the Nell of Old Drury, 29 Catherine Street, WC2 opposite the Drury Lane Theatre. The Nell in question, of course, is King Charles II's favourite, Nell Gwynn.
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FILMING
LOCATIONS FOR FRENZY
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TRAVEL
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Covent Garden: tube:
Covent Garden (Piccadilly line) The name is a corrupted reference to the old convent garden which once occupied the area. This was once one of the capital’s three great produce markets: Billingsgate for fish, Smithfield for meat and Covent Garden for fruit, veg and flowers. It was a world in itself; one of the few places where the UK ’s stringent licensing laws were officially relaxed, allowing porters to down a pint at the civilised hour of six in the morning – if you didn’t look too much like a tourist, chances were you could join them. British New Wave director Lindsay Anderson kicked off his cinematic career here in 1957, as part of the Free Cinema movement, with a documentary about the market porters, Every Day Except Christmas. In 1973, though, the whole operation moved to a soulless new facility at Nine Elms, south of the Thames near Vauxhall, and the old market buildings were titivated to become terrace cafés and boutiques stocked with designer clothes and scented candles. By 1992, Richard Attenborough was obliged to use the meat market at Smithfield as a stand-in for the Garden in his biopic Chaplin. The real fruit and veg business market was still in full swing in 1972 though, when Alfred Hitchcock used it as the setting for Frenzy.
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ASSOCIATED
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