Marnie

(1964) ***1/2

This is a fun, apparently controversial late Hitchcock that I knew little about before popping it in this afternoon. My 6 year old twins watched for a while with me, and they were pretty engrossed by the “mean” lead female character who keeps robbing her employers. Thankfully, they begged off before the real suspense kicked in late in the movie.

The jacket describes Marnie as a “psychological thriller,” and clearly that’s correct in a very obvious way. It’s about a con woman who gets basically blackmailed into marrying one of the businessmen she robs, and it becomes pretty clear early on that she has issues with men, the color red, telling the truth, and lightning. She’s also really mean to the little girl her mom is babysitting.

Connery is the upper class sleeze/concerned good guy who blackmails her into marriage and then rapes her during their honeymoon cruise (afew minutes after giving her his word he wouldn’t force her into sex). It’s a disturbing scene because it highlights the script’s moral ambiguity regarding the Connery character. He’s a zoologist who seems to have been forced into saving the family business, so when he finds this wild and injured creature, he must capture and tame her. And yet, much of his taming (beyond the rape) comes in the form of what seems to be genuine concern, even maybe love. At times, it struck me as a strongly feminist movie—Hitchcock deconstructing the male need to dominate and possess, even if masked under the guise of the kind authoritative husband. Indeed, I think the Connery character is as much being psychoanalyzed by the script as Marnie. She gets the eureka breakthrough at the end, when all is revealed as the result of a childhood trauma (a disturbing flashback starring a young Bruce Dern), but there’sa lot less depth and mystery about her character.

When I reviewed Caligari a couple years ago, I learned a bit about German expressionism, and it’s pretty apparent that Hitchcock is having fun with some of that here. I guess that’s true of a lot of his movies, since expressionism is artistic shorthand for approximating the inner space of the mind. If you’ve seen Caligari, you’ll remember the theatrical artificiality of a lot of the sets, and this will jump out at you in Marnie too. The special effects, too, are intentionally artificial, from the “red screen” that signals when Marnie is having a psychotic episode, to a static zoom in-out-in-out signaling dizziness. There’s also a lot of cool scene framing with angles and shadows that seems right out of some old German film.

Anyway, this is quite good stuff, perhaps brought down a bit by the weightlessness of its two main stars. It really is THEIR movie, and they’re onstage together virtually the entire time. Connery doesn’t quite have the depth to play the well meaning sociopathic blue blood, and Hedrun is only so-so as the PTSD clepto. I wonder if this wouldn’t be counted amongst Hitchcock’s masterpieces if he’d been able to film it a few years earlier with, say Grant and Kelly in the lead roles. But apparently, decency laws forbade even the hint of onscreen rape until the early 60s, so he had to sit on this project for a while.