``Frenzy'' Hitchcock's most violent and immoral film *Note! Contains spoilers.

Why we chose Covent Garden as a filming location

The main setting of this work is Covent Garden, located in the City of Westminster, central London. It is a lively area that has flourished as a fruit and vegetable market for about 300 years. It is also famous as the filming location for ` `My Fair Lady '' (1964), and the scene where Audrey Hepburn sings while holding vegetables in her hands is memorable.

However, in the mid-'70s, the market moved to Nine Elms, located on the south bank of the Thames. A shopping center was built on the site, and it has been transformed into a tourist destination with museums and an opera house. Frenzy captures the last vestiges of Covent Garden, which was once a vibrant fruit and vegetable market.

In fact, Hitchcock's father was a merchant who worked in Covent Garden. For him, this place was also a place with fond memories of his impressionable childhood. It is said that an acquaintance of Hitchcock's father visited the set during filming, and that Hitchcock treated him to lunch. Hitchcock must have sensed that the area's time as a fruit and vegetable market was coming to an end, and so he set up his camera with the desire to ``imprint the memories of his childhood on film.''

Hitchcock was thought by those around him to be at the end of his career as a film director. I feel that there is something strange about him choosing Covent Garden as the setting, as ``its era as a fruit and vegetable market is coming to an end.'' Perhaps I was projecting onto this place of memories the image of myself that seemed to be swallowed up by the times no matter how hard I tried.

"Frenzy" (c) Photofest / Getty Images

My guess is that another reason Hitchcock chose Covent Garden as a filming location is because Frenzy's theme is food. Indeed, the fruit and vegetable market is the perfect setting for depicting food. However, in this work, appetite is treated almost as a synonym for sexual desire. The real culprit, Robert Rusk (Barry Foster), is set up as a middleman at a fruit and vegetable market, and he is nibbling on fruit. The fruit is clearly a metaphor for the woman herself. Considering this, the ``gesture of biting the fruit'' can also be considered to be a hint that he is ``a murderer who forcibly engages in sexual acts with women.''

Another memorable scene is the scene in which Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) struggles with the many unusual dishes his wife (Vivian Merchant) cooks every time he returns home. All the dishes are grotesque and completely unappetizing. If we assume that appetite equals sexual desire, then it can be interpreted as Hitchcock's style of black humor, suggesting that ``sexual acts are hideous to the outside.''

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