Marnie (1964) - film review

Marnie is a young woman with a troubled past who despises men and who tries desperately to buy her mother’s love.  Her personal demons compel her to adopt various aliases and steal from her employers.  Her latest victim is Mark Rutland, the wealthy owner of a successful printing company.  Having obtained a job as an office girl, she intends to raid his company’s safe and make a quick departure, just as she has done so many times before.  But this time it isn’t so easy.  Mark becomes fascinated with her, he is concerned by her strange phobias – her fear of thunderstorms and the colour red – and he falls in love with her.  Undeterred, Marnie carries out her scheme, but Mark manages to find her and talks her into marrying him.  On their honeymoon, Marnie reveals her revulsion for physical contact.  Mark wonders what could have made Marnie behave like this and resolves to find some answers...

Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, the one which has probably undergone the greatest reappraisal since its initial release is Marnie.  When it was first released, the film fared very badly at the box office and was written off by the critics.  Today, it is regarded in a far more favourable light, regarded by some as a masterpiece, considered by others to be an essential milestone in the development of the psychosexual thriller.

Marnie’s initial release may have been more successful if it been made, as was originally intended, straight after Psycho.  Both of these films deal with the same themes of perverse child-mother relationships, repressed sexuality and traumatic childhood experiences that result in a distorted adult personality.  Grace Kelly was to have played the part of Marnie, but when she pulled out of the project Hitchcock decided to shelve it.  The director later decided to proceed with it after he had worked with Tippi Hedren on The Birds, having realised that Hedren was a perfect substitute for Grace Kelly.

The choice of the male lead presented more of a problem.  Sean Connery had been catapulted to stardom as agent 007 in the first two Bond films – Dr No and From Russia with Love – and so Hitchcock was easily persuaded that he was a bankable commodity.  As it turned out, Connery was an inspired choice, his solid masculine earthiness making a perfect contrast with Hedren’s ethereal portrayal of unsullied femininity.   Although there are a number of minor characters (all of which are very well played), Marnie is pretty much a two-handed drama, and so its success depends greatly on the contributions of its two lead actors.  If Marnie works at all it is because of the intense and considered performances of Connery and Hedren.

One of the perceived weaknesses of Marnie is the poor quality of its special effects, particularly its imperfect use of blue screen back projection.  Some reviewers have commented that these are not so much flaws as ingenious expressionistic touches which add to the film’s sense of realism, since they draw us into the artificial, highly distorted world of the main character.  Anyone watching the digitally re-mastered version of Marnie on DVD on a high-definition television may find this a little hard to swallow, but the truth is that the imperfect special effects do not greatly detract from the drama and they certainly do not spoil one’s appreciation of the film.  

The main flaw that Marnie suffers from is the somewhat dated psychobabble which underpins much of the plot.  The worst instance of this is the scene at the end of the film where Marnie regresses to her childhood, for reasons that are neither apparent nor particularly convincing.   This sequence is brilliantly realised (and makes good use of the zoom-forward-and-track-back effect previously used in Vertigo) but lacks the restraint that Hitchcock showed in his denouements to Vertigo and Psycho.

Whilst Marnie is undoubtedly weak in a few areas, it is exceptional in others.  The precision of the camerawork and editing is of a calibre that is rarely surpassed by Hitchcock in any of his films, showing an attention to detail that an experienced Swiss clockmaker would find hard to match.   Every opportunity where suspense can be built is taken and masterfully exploited – note the marvellous sequence where Marnie’s attempt to steal from Mark’s safe is very nearly thwarted by a cleaning lady, a typical Hitchcockian piece of fun.   And there is a wonderfully evocative score from Bernard Herrmann (the composer’s last work for a Hitchcock film), which does so much to build the tension and convey the feelings of the characters caught up in the drama.  Marnie may not be perfect, but, as St Augustine once professed, perfection isn’t everything.

© James Travers 2008

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