Hitchcock's return to England after three decades in Hollywood, and to his classic innocent-man-on-the-run scenario, Frenzy was hailed as a decisive return to form after the critical and box office disappointments of Topaz and Torn Curtain. In London, a serial killer has raped and murdered a number of women, strangling them to death with a necktie. When his estranged wife becomes the latest victim, circumstantial evidence leads to the arrest and conviction of ex-RAF pilot Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) as the killer, but the real culprit is his friend Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who deliberately targeted Blaney's wife to frame him. Swearing vengeance, Blaney manages to escape from prison while Rusk tries to gruesomely recover a telltale piece of evidence from his latest victim, and an inquisitive Scotland Yard inspector (Alec McCowen) begins to wonder whether the police didn't in fact have the wrong man all along. A gallows humour grotesque, with that distinctively dark Hitchcockian wit underscoring some of the most graphic scenes of violence in any Hitchcock film, Frenzy is "easily the strongest of the Master's final works" (Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine).