There are kind of reverberations of other Hitchcocks too, like Rebecca and Notorious - not to mention Gaslight, also with Bergman. Michael Wilding (An Ideal Husband, Stage Fright, In Which We Serve) arrives in Australia with uncle Cecil Parker, immediately runs into brutish ex-con Joseph Cotten and his crazy wife Ingrid Bergman, and their scheming maid Margaret Leighton.
As I mentioned before, the long takes, an overspill from Rope, are absolutely fascinating and actually make it look ahead of its time. I mean you can see cinematographers like Robert Surtees using a crane elegantly in something like The Bad and the Beautiful, but this goes way beyond that.
"I had to light many sets in one go. the sets were mostly in sections which slide open electronically so that the giant electric crane could enter and exit. Good recorded sound was impossible; the noise was indescribable." When the camera tracks down the guests on the dining table, each one fell onto a mattress with their section of table so the four foot Technicolor camera could get by! (Jack Cardiff, 'Magic Hour'.) It was filmed at Elstree - the Hitchcocks did go home before Frenzy. The cast hated the way it was filmed.
Our 2006 Orbit Media copy is fuzzy and sludgy. The Kino Blu-Ray is apparently the way to go. It seems like in the ball scene that all the actors are wearing green make-up.
Hitch is so in the background it's no fun. And for a number of reasons it doesn't quite come off - the script is lacking, there's no humour, it isn't suspenseful enough - but most interesting and well acted.
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