Classic Review: Marnie (1964)

Marnie is a very strange film that seems to struggle with its multiple threads of sexual abuse and unrelated mystery. The conclusion of this latter storyline makes the film quite problematic, yet its lurid and visceral thrills, as well as its unconventionality, make it one of Hitchcock’s most ambitious films.

Indeed, the film is strange in its excess, melding together psychosexual drama with murder mystery in a narrative that, like Hitchcock’s earlier film Vertigo (1958), works best in the strange heights it reaches, rather than how it travels there. Any broad descriptions of the plot are quite misleading, because the film strangely investigates the multiple threads of the thief Marnie (Tippi Hedren) and a man played by Sean Connery, who forces Marnie into a marriage and rapes her in the film. The subversion of Sean Connery’s charm is excellent, although the film rather perversely still seems to take his side in some respects, following his investigation into the causes of why Marnie experiences no sexual desire towards men (anyone who has seen a Hitchcock film before could have a good guess). This inconsistent psychosexual investigation is made (even more) problematic considering lead Tippi Hedren’s sexual assault allegations against Hitchcock.

Although one of his lesser-seen films, this one is truly satisfying for Hitchcock fans, with Psycho call-backs, with a creepy mother silhouette and a “man’s best friend is his mother” line, as well as Vertigo-esque pulsating lighting and the shared theme of obsessive desire. This is Hitchcock’s Hollywood stylisation of nightmare, but the disturbing subject matter is also accompanied by dour uses of sepia and blood effects that are more akin to his later work, Frenzy (1972), which itself appears to visually mirror gritty British crime films such as Get Carter (1971).

I think to take the film literally would render it incredibly lamentable, and here Connery is James Bond if the women said no. Still, there is some strange visceral interest in watching him rush around an empty cruise ship for the woman he has captured – the pure sense of isolation in a fantasy of his own making, even if this is condemned less than the obsession in Vertigo. I think that much of the pleasure of the film is the dramatization of the tension of being trapped, with a great long take compartmentalising Marnie as she steals from a vault, a cleaner always in view, silently edging her way towards the titular character. This tension between freedom and entrapment is as palpable as anything, and the film’s rocky relationship with conventional morality only deepens the strange nightmare.