MARNIE (1964)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Crime / Drama

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Tippi Hedren / Sean Connery / Diane Baker

Plot

Con artist and thief Marnie plots to rob her wealthy boss, only to have him blackmail her into marriage once he finds out.

What I Liked

Though the title character’s neurosis is the true focus of the movie, I found the more intriguing character to be that of Mark Rutland, the man so obsessed with her that he forces her into marriage.  Sean Connery plays Mark with the same suave masculinity he brought to James Bond for the first time just two years prior.  This time, though, that confidence is mixed with a myopic fixation bordering on dangerous and a manipulative streak that approaches villainy.  Neither were traits of Bond, allowing Connery to show his range by pulling off this added complexity with absolute believability.  He may not be the criminal in the story, but Rutland is certainly a jerk (arguably even a rapist), yet it’s hard to argue with the results.  He may be an absolute asshole, but he gets exactly what he wants every time he tries for it.  That impressive quality alone makes him much more interesting than Tippi Hedren’s perpetually pouty Marnie.

Director Alfred Hitchcock makes the most of the film’s more suspenseful scenes with the various slights of hand and gimmicks for which he was famous.  However, it is really the film’s score, composed by Bernard Herrmann (also responsible for contributing essential scores to Hitch classics like “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest” and “Psycho”) that contributes the truly unsettling mood to the film.  Anytime Herrmann’s music can be heard, an unavoidable eeriness permeates the movie, not necessarily in visuals or plot at all, but simply through the music’s toying with the audience’s nerves.

What I Didn’t Like

What must have been considered a cutting-age psychological thriller wields less of an impact five decades later, now that the films that it influenced have surpassed it both for both psychological depth and shock value.  Marnie’s unusual hang-ups (screaming during thunderstorms, having panic attacks at the sight of the color red, and a physical repulsion to the touch of a man) come off more as kooky than disturbing to a modern viewer.  That the plot mainly follows her husband’s pursuit of the source of these troubles consequently weakens the film as a whole, especially since the big payoff at the end isn’t half as shocking as the conclusion to a run-of-the-mill “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.”

Most Memorable Scene

The most controversial scene of the film is the consummation of the marriage between Marnie and Mark, a scene that implies that Mark essentially rapes Marnie.  Partly because the rape itself is not seen (thankfully), it is not nearly as shocking or upsetting for a modern viewer as it would have been for a filmgoer in 1964.  Thus I will bypass that scene and pick another as my personal favorite: the car ride where Mark reveals his marriage plans to a dumbfounded Marnie.  He calmly breaks the news to her with all the tact of a caveman hitting a woman over the head with a club and making off with her slumped over his shoulder.  Meanwhile, she resorts to all the guile she can muster to manipulate her way out of matrimony.  It’s an amusing clash of personalities that reveals a great deal of how each character makes his or her way through the world, only in this case Mark completely dominates the battle, with Marnie finding her bag of tricks powerless against his detached self-confidence.  Ultimately, it is still a rape of a less physical kind, one that relies less on shock value and more on clever writing.

My Rating: 3 out of 5