I watched Marnie today for the first time. I really liked the first part of the film. I think the idea of a compulsive liar and thief really could have made for a great Hitchcock movie. I’m even open for the idea of being terrified of random events such as the color red or thunderstorms.
Tippi Hedren, I know her from The Birds. I understand this movie basically killed her career. She was excellent as the woman who would get menial jobs and then figure out how to steal from the company while moving on and assuming a new identity.
Sean Connery also did a good job. He’s obviously trying to make sure he isn’t stereotyped as James Bond. I can believe him as a wealthy man who takes an interest in Marnie with her MO in getting low level clerical jobs and then stealing.
But the last 2/3 of the movie left me cold. I really didn’t get into the whole prostitution/rape/child molesting aspect of the last 2/3 of the film.
This would have been an excellent film, a Hitchcock masterpiece, if he wouldn’t have gone so far. The movie is too long by at least 30 minutes. The ‘rape’ scene is unnecessary. For whatever screwy reason Rutland had for wanting to marry Marnie, he is shown to be as messed up as Marnie from this scene onward.
Your opinions?
Hitchcock was obsessed with Tippi Hedron, his Grace Kelly replacement (BTW, she’s also Melanie Gfiffith’s mother), and when she wouldn’t go to bed with him he deliberately ruined her career. He wouldn’t put her in any more movies or loan get out to other studios. There was a made for tv movie on this recently called Hitchcock.
I agree the rape scene was icky. It was probably what Hitchcock wanted to do to her.
I was born around the time that that movie came out. Around twenty years ago my now ex-wife and I went on a Hitchcock kick and eventually rented it. It is one of my least favorite of his films.
What’s nuts is that I have met a few women named Marnie who are about my age. I think that there was a brief spike in that name when the movie came out. Two different women told me that they were named for that movie. I can’t imagine that their parents actually saw the thing.
I finally got a chance to see this, as they’re running it on AMC a lot recently. I’d wanted to see it for years, but until now it never seemed to be on TV, or available on video anywhere I was, or in Revival as other Hitchcock movies were. I suspect the “rape” scene put a lot of people off.
And Hitchcock definitely did want to do that. Ed McBain wrote the initial screenplay, and wanted to remove the scene, because he thought it would be fatal to the acceptance of Connery’s character. Hitchcock fired him for that. The Rape Scene was his entire reason for making the movie in the first place. He knew [exactly how he wanted it shot. (I have this from cable TV commentary, plus what I’ve found on the internet sites).
I find it odd that people feel that this is a significant departure from Connery’s James Bond role. As far as I can see, it’s no departure at all – he’s still playing an impeccably-dressed young man moving through a world of wealth and priviledge. He looks, sounds, and acts just like his Bond character. I can easily see Bond going to on the fox hunt or going to the restaurants as his character does in ythis film. Even the way he’s rough on Marnie matches Connery’s behavior in From Russia witrh Love and the other early Bond flicks. It’s just that here he’s an independent young man, not a secret agent-cum-assassin.
The rape is scene is the emphasis that Mark [Sean Connery] is fucked up in his own way. He thinks that love, tenderness, affection will cause Marnie to respond in kind, but she doesn’t, and he’s finally pushed beyond the limit of his self-control. Hitchcock’s message in this film (as in PSYCHO) is pretty much that everyone is fucked up, that the line between mildly neurotic and deeply psychotic is only a hair’s breathe; that being human means being seriously flawed; and that the only hope of redemption lies in loving relationships. It’s a bleak universe.
I find the current dismissal of some of Hitchcock’s films (and ditto other artists) as “just some expression of their own screwed-up lives” to be fairly shallow. If we learn that Shakespeare had suicidal thoughts, does that mean that HAMLET is “just” an expression of his own depression? I try to focus on the art, not the artist.
Well, I didn’t mean it ONLY the way you put it in your second paragraph. The profundity of the thought in your first paragraph does not negate the fact that people are screwed up and Hitchcock was one of those people. It’s the word “just” that is the problem. Substitute “and” for “just.”
The made-for-TV movie about Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedron during the making of The Birds was called The Girl. Hitchcock was a theatrical release about the making of Psycho.
I actually saw them both on the same day as in-flight films.
I agree, but also would add that Hitchcock was part of the mid-20th-century popularization of the generally-Freudian notion that the reasons for “abnormal” behavior can be found in childhood trauma.
He explored this theme again and again. His frequent emphasis on the “why” of phobias, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and other disorders would have seemed very peculiar to consumers of popular culture a century earlier.
Fair enough. But there are some works by acknowledged masters that are disappointing in some way; at times it’s possible to attribute the work’s problems to problems in living experienced by the artist. In this case, it does appear that one reason “Marnie” hasn’t been as well-received as many of Hitchcock’s other films, is that his own obsessions put the movie off-balance in some important ways.
Whenever Hitchcock tried to be more literal about psychotherapy and its processes, it always ended up muddled and ham-fisted. Spellbound has the great Dali sequence, but is absurdly too connect-the-dots. The worst part of Psycho is the last scene “explaining” Norman’s condition. And Marnie might be a truly intriguing if it didn’t immerse head-first into the boring, linear “decoding” of her behavior through psychoanalysis. The movie is wrong-headed in its view of women, no doubt, but it’s also a clunker in the staging and resolution of its mystery.
But blaming Hitch on Tippi Hedren’s career demise is a little one-dimensional. She is also, quite frankly, a terrible actress. Another reason Marnie is such a failure is that she doesn’t deliver what is necessary to make the character more real and less schematic. While he was obsessed with blondes before, they were generally quite talented. Hedren was picked for her looks, and her range is just enough to give The Birds what it needs, but she’s adrift in Marnie, hopelessly out of her league.
One might say Hitch was usually an expert caster, knowing what actors fit parts well. And some actors (Tony Perkins, Robert Walker) had their signature roles or greatest parts in his films. But I can’t recall a single great performance by an actor in his films who didn’t give great performances elsewhere. He usually was canny in getting good material and finding the right actor, and his genius was assembling it together. But as someone who could nurture a good performance out of an unlikely candidate, it simply didn’t happen. And even if Marnie had been a hit, Hedren’s shelf life post-Alfred would’ve been short-lived. She simply wasn’t good.
Marnie has always been one of my favorite Hitchcock films, so I’m disheartened to learn from this thread that it’s not very good.
I think its strengths are its perversity; the fact that every character is messed up, as C K says upthread; and that it’s very funny - it’s really almost a comedy, with lots of quips written into the script. I recommend everyone see it on a big screen if they can - it’s very satisfying visually.
My favorite Hitchcock is Notorious but Marnie is a close second. So you’re not the only one disheartened to hear it’s no good. I always loved the (cousin?) and her sarcastic comments (and great wardrobe). I liked the ending - thought it was well done between Marnie and her mother. Yes, the “rape” scene is unfortunate and I think it fails because I don’t believe the Mark in the rest of the movie would have done it. At the same time, it does put Mark in less of a perfect man light and probably makes him a better match for a habitual thief.
This is how I see it: when assessing a work of art, you make two separate judgments, namely, 1) do I like it?, and 2) is it “good.” There are four possible combinations. Sometimes you may actually like a movie that’s also considered good. But there’s plenty of “good” art (movies included) that I don’t like. And there’s stuff I like a lot and watch over and over that isn’t considered good art. So what and who cares? Keep these two judgments in two separate buckets and you’ll be fine.
