Carter and the Role Michael Caine Turned Down in "Frenzy" (1972)
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Get Carter
ecarle — 9 years ago(January 29, 2017 10:24 AM)
In 1972, famed director Alfred Hitchcock got himself a comeback film by returning to film in London after several decades in Hollywood. The movie was called "Frenzy" and was Hitchocck's first R-rated movie. In accord with other movies of the "1971-1972 sex and violence corridor" of thrillers I would cite Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, Deliverance, A Clockwork Orange, and Get Carter among them Frenzy was gritty(especially for Hitchcock) and graphic. "Frenzy" told the tale of a genial Covent Garden greengrocer named Bob Rusk, whose sideline was raping women and then strangling them with a necktie left round the neck of each victim.
Bob Rusk was played by the near-unknown British stage and film actor, Barry Foster.
Foster was offered the role only after Hitchcock had first offered the role of Bob Rusk toMichael Caine.
In one of his biographies, Caine noted that he "didn't want to be associated with the part" of rapist-killer Bob Rusk. Some years later, Caine noted that Barry Foster, who took the role, had once played Caine's own brother in a TV production. They certainly looked and sounded alike(with perhaps a bit of Richard Dawson mixed in with Foster's look and sound.)
But what has always intrigued me about Michael Caine turning down the role of rapist-killer Bob Rusk in Frenzy is how close Rusk is toCarter in Get Carter, a film that was released only a year before Frenzy and which, perhaps, inspired Hitchcock to offer Rusk to Caine in the first place.
I suppose its a matter of Carter's motivations that make him a "less worse" character than Rusk. Carter is, famously, avenging both the murder of his brother and the (later-discovered) sexual ruination of his niece and as such is a "bad guy killing worse guys" in Get Carter. He's also playing a gangster in Get Carter, and as such, gets our "clearance" to kill other gangsters(and their molls.)
Meanwhile, Rusk is a sexual psychopath who preys exclusively on women.
That said, if we are wondering how Michael Caine would have played Hitchcock's Rusk if given the chancelook no further than Get Carter.
For Carter is a bit of a psychopath, too. Look how he acts like he will spare the life of the man who fesses up to the murder/pornography conspiracy. Carter stabs the man to death after promising he would NOT kill him(well, he sorta promised.)
And Carter like Rusk is not beneath beating up (in one case) and shooting up(with heroin, in another case), weaker, defenseless women. Yes, they are in the sexual employ of the villains but stillno mercy.
We're on Carter's side throughout Get Carter. Nothing's more satisfying than seeing a man capable of taking on, beating up, and killing, all the bad guys even if he is a bad guy himself. Still, Caine plays Carter "scary" enough that he never seems very normal.
And so, Hitchcock's sexual psychopath Bob Rusk wasn't all THAT much out of Caine's range, and Caine was perhaps lying to himself in thinking that Rusk was a role he couldn't play. He already hadas Carter.
Irony: though Michael Caine made the great "Sleuth" in 1972(the year of Frenzy's release), much of Caine's other work in the early seventies wasn't nearly as good as Frenzy. (Get Carter and Sleuth excepted.) Had Caine taken the role of Bob Rusk, he might have helped make that movie a classic rather than a success.
But I suppose Caine had to consider what happened to Anthony Perkins career