The Talkies/PoIanski's Emmanuelle

...and S.—as do the first names of Polanski and Miss Tate...

...Of course, one man's obvious borrowing is another man's vague affinity...

...Some of the Hitchcock echoes are amusingly familiar...

...film that Polanski has ever made...

...a drunk claims to have seen her forced into a car by some men...

...Sondra asks him as the cab enters the city...

...To see Polanski—whose films always have the freshness of visions derived from life, not from other bits of celluloid—playing the hommage game with these second-raters was not, for me, a consummation devoutly to be wished...

...Fortunately, however, my apprehensions proved to be remarkably unjustified...

...This, at least, might help to explain why, for all its borrowings from the Hitchcock oeuvre, Frantic feels so real—so sincerely, strangely, and painfully felt—so much of the time...

...For instance, like many of Hitchcock's movies—Vertigo, North by Northwest, Saboteur, and Rear Window, among others—Frantic contains a scene that plays with our fear of heights (the scene, in which Walker climbs over Michelle's slippery roof with her big, clumsy suitcase in hand, is particularly reminiscent of the clinging-to-a-rooftop climax of To Catch a Thief...

...Many of Hitch-cock's heroines, incidentally, have names that begin with M: Madeleine in Vertigo, Marion in Psycho, Melanie in The Birds, Marnie in Marnie...

...when Walker, unable to open one of their suitcases, realizes that it is not theirs at all, and that Sondra must have picked it up by mistake at the airport, he sees it as nothing more than a frustrating inconvenience, while we panic—is there a bomb inside...

...it only increases the ambiguity, hikes up the tension level...

...From these simple, ordinary, everyday acts Polanski extracts an overwhelming sense of menace...

...Hitchcock imitation, after all, is the specialitá de la maison of the typical contemporary film-school graduate, the slick technician in search of a sensibility, the sort of person whose metaphysical cravings seem thoroughly satisfied by a diet of MGM B-movies, Republic two-reelers, and George Lucas space operas...

...Yet everything about the hotel they check into later that morning is a model of order, serenity, familiarity: there are VISA and American Express plaques...

...Like Stewart's Ben McKenna, who "liberated Africa" during World War II, Walker has been to this part of the world before—he and Sondra came to Paris on their honeymoon—but doesn't know it well at all...

...That film featured a similar opening two-shot of Stewart and Doris Day in front of a vehicle's back window: they were in the back seat of a bus, heading into Marrakesh...

...After a visit (inspired by similar scenes in Topaz and Vertigo...

...Realizing that Sondra's disappearance might be related to the inadvertent suitcase switch, he jimmies open the mystery suitcase and finds, among other things, a matchbook (red-tipped matches) that leads him to a nightclub called the Blue Parrot (an hommage, to be sure, of a distinctly un-Hitchcockian sort—though the club's denizens are less reminiscent of the extras in Casablanca than of the circus freaks in Hitch-cock's Saboteur), to the blood-spattered corpse of a lowlife named Dede, and to an ally of sorts in the person of Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a strikingly beautiful young punker and part-time transatlantic drug courier who worked for D6c16 and belongs to the mystery suitcase...

...When the taxi gets a flat tire it's a foreshadowing of the by Bruce Bawer unexpected turn of events that will follow...

...Frantic is full of subtle motifs: animals (the dog in the replacement taxi, Dedes friendly cat, the drug-sniffing German shepherds at the airport, the pigeons engaging in intercourse outside Michelle's skylight), whose appearance often signals danger...

...Like many a Hitchcock film, Frantic opens with energetic, arresting music (by Ennio Morricone) and a riveting image that establishes the film's principal setting—in this instance, a point-of-view shot, from a moving taxicab, of the highway leading into Paris from Orly Airport...

...No, not a McMuffin, a MacGuffin—a word Hitchcock used to refer to the contrivances, at once all-important and utterly insignificant, upon which many of his plots were built: the uranium hidden in the wine bottles in Notorious, the secret formula in The Thirty-Nine Steps, the clause of the peace treaty in Foreign Correspondent...

...telephones...

...so the crossed keys on the concierge's jacket represent the mistakenly exchanged suitcases that set in motion the plot of Frantic...

...What's more, several times in this movie one is made to recall the slaying of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, and certainly one feels that at least something of Walker's reaction to Sondra's abduction must be derived from Polanski's memory of his own horror at Miss Tate's savage murder...

...W alker also finds himself in circumstances of increasing disorder and slovenliness...

...From this we fade to a two-shot of the couple in the cab's back seat, Dr...

...even the predominant colors in the lobby and in their luxurious suite—a relaxing, complementary array of muted grays, blues, and off-whites—are in harmony with the colors of the Walkers' wardrobe...

...Moments later, while he's in the shower (and in the foreground of the shot), 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 Sondra (in the background) receives a phone call, slips into a dress (significantly, a red dress), tells him something (which he—and we—can't hear), and casually steps out of frame (thus do people disappear from each other's lives...

...with each morning Walker looks more disheveled...

...every time he shows up at the hotel he looks a bit less respectable, and cares less about it...

...the concierge speaks fluent English...

...When Walker steps out of the shower—which is as important here, in its way, as a symbol of vulnerability as it is in Psycho—Sondra is gone...

...Polanski makes witty, Hitchcockian use of music, too: to name just one example, when Walker phones the embassy toward the end of the film, he is put on hold and is forced to listen to a Muzak version of the theme from Moulin Rouge, a.k.a...

...As our memory of his love for his wife grows dimmer (and as Michelle and her outfits grow sultrier), this is indeed one of the questions uppermost in our minds: where is Walker's heart...

...Significantly, the first names of the husband and wife in this film begin with the same letters—R...

...For instance—as my references to the film's periodic bursts of red may have suggested—he manages to achieve a good deal of shock value, in this mostly muted-gray movie, by offering an occasional splash of bright color: a green garbage truck, Michelle's yellow Volkswagen (to which, peculiarly enough, she seems to have the keys, though a key ring in the suitcase containing her only apartment key also contained a VW key), a sexy red dress which Michelle wears in the last few sequences of the film (at last clearly spelling out her Doppelgdnger relationship to Sondra, who might well have been this young and beautiful when she and Walker honeymooned in Paris twenty years ago...

...Partof the answer is that there's a dark, genuinely disturbing quality here—a rather Conradian darkness (not so inappropriate, come to think of it, since Polanski, like Conrad, is a Pole-turned-Westerner) which is alien to Hitchcock...

...With its disconcerting fire-engine red color, moreover, the Pizza Hut from the beginning screams out a warning that everything here is not as peaceful and orderly as it seems...

...All I could think was that Frantic would be another flatfooted, academic Hitchcock hommage like Dressed to Kill, Brian DePalma's pallid ripoff of Psycho...

...indeed, perhaps part of the reason for Polanski's elaborate use of borrowed Hitchcockian motifs and images was that, in making a movie that taps such profound wells of private grief, he felt an unusually strong need' for an external principle of order...

...Nobody in the lobby has seen her...

...Furthermore, since both the police and the American Embassy officers are reluctant to believe that Sondra has been kidnapped, Walker—like many a Hitchcock hero—begins the search for his missing person quite without assistance...

...Walker learns that the men who kidnapped his wife are spies, that Dede—and, in turn, Michelle—worked for them, and that a souvenir Statue of Liberty replica in Michelle's suitcase (an allusion to Saboteur, in which the title character falls to his death from Lady Liberty's torch) contains the top-secret "Kryton," a gizmo of American manufacture used for"triggering the detonation of nuclear devices...

...Why, I wondered, had Polanski—the director of such wonderful films as Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, and Tess—opted to straitjacket himself in such a fashion...

...And this in spite of the almost textbook-scale borrowing of motifs and images from Hitchcock—a borrowing that begins in the very first frames...

...Where is Your Heart...

...Just as the crossed tennis rackets, in that film, symbolize the exchange of murders that Robert Walker proposes (might the name Richard Walker, in fact, be based on the name of that actor...

...and certainly some of the instances of Hitchcock imitation, in this film, are a good deal more self-evident than others...

...Whatever the case, Frantic is ultimately a doubly successful film—at once a dazzling entertainment and a disquieting work of art...

...T hese opening sequences—in the 1 cab and lobby, and especially in the suite—have a terrific naturalness...

...Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) of San Francisco and his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley), who are arriving in town for a medical conference—a situation reminiscent of Hitchcock's 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which James Stewart plays an American doctor who is visiting North Africa with his wife and son after attending a Paris medical convention...

...There is also an abundance of keys—suitcase keys, hotel-room keys, the keys to Michelle's flat...

...Nor does she show up for breakfast (Walker having placed a red rose on her pillow...

...money, which Michelle covets so eagerly and which Walker hands out with such abandon and in such abundance—to a bellhop, to the concierge (who refuses it), to Michelle (who finally gives it back), to several bartenders and waiters and cab drivers, to a coke dealer, to an airport parking-lot attendant—that the film represents, amongmany other things, a moral commentary on the whole business of getting and spending...

...What we have here, then, is one of Hitchcock's favorite motifs, which he made use of in The Lady Vanishes, Vertigo, and a number of other films: the missing-person motif...

...at movie's end Walker tussles with a man bearing a long knife, and all the Hitchcock allusions fly out the window, and the only thing we can remember is Jack Nicholson's nose getting sliced in Chinatown...

...to a flower shop across the street—whose proprietor tries to sell him a bouquet of red roses Walker finds Sondra's bracelet in a nearby alley...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 39...

...The early-morning concierge, traced to a health club (its window frames and workout equipment all painted fire-engine red), informs Walker that Sondra left the hotel with a red-haired man...

...The "Kryton" is a classic Hitchcock-style MacGuffin...

...Do you know where you are...

...Though the plot unfolds in conventional fashion, Polanski infuses it with surprising wit and urgency...

...The considerable length of this "take," by the way, is itself very Hitchcockianremember Rope, which contains not a single visible cut...

...Polanski very swiftly makes us believe in these characters and in their easy, jokey, loving relationship...

...every scene brings yet another extremely provocative touch...

...For heaven's sake, even the name of his film was unpromising: mentioning it in conversations, I kept confusing it with Frenzy, the title of one of Hitchcock's later, lamer efforts—an unpleasant echo which, it seemed to me, must almost certainly have been intentional...

...His latest book, Diminishing Fictions, will be published this spring by Graywolf Press...

...That he never explicitly betrays a weakness for Michelle's extraordinary feminine charms—the furthest he will go is to say "You look nice" when she puts on her red dress—doesn't keep us from positing a romantic interest...

...Finally, like Vertigo (which is set in the Walkers' home town), Frantic ends on an embankment beneath a bridge—not at the Golden Gate, of course, but at the Seine, with all the landmarks of Paris in plain sight...

...It seems, one might say, a personal film in a way that none of Hitchcock's films were...

...This placement of chaos amid familiar symbols of civilization and order—the British Museum in Blackmail, Westminster Abbey in Foreign Correspondent, the Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, the United Nations and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest—is a vintage Hitchcock device, and Polanski makes very effective use of it...

...there are even pairs of crossed keys on the lapels of the concierge's jacket—an image reminiscent of the crossed tennis rackets on Farley Granger's cigarette lighter in Strangers on a Train...

...Like several Hitchcock heroes, in short, Walker soon finds himself to be (a) deeply involved, thanks to an accidental turn of events, in international espionage intrigue, (b) turning for companionship and support to a comely stranger whom he cannot completely trust, (c) moving around a lot, meeting odd characters, getting the lay of the land, and (d) wrangling over a MacGuffin...

...The film begins at dawn, and ends at about the same time two days later...

...For the perfect touch of home, there is even a Pizza Hut adjacent to the lobby—an all-American eatery which, as the film heads further and further into darkness and entropy, will increasingly seem an ironic comment on the all-American niceness, naivete, and normality that characterized the Walkers on arrival...

...Engaging of style, compelling of tone, highly distinctive in its "look," Frantic is as fresh and original as any Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...He also very swiftly makes us recognize—as they do not—how naked and vulnerable they are...

...His reply: "It's changed so much...

...W hat, for all these Hitchcockian borrowings, makes Polanski's vision distinct from Hitchcock's...