Marnie

MARNIE         A                    

USA  (130 mi)  1964  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

I would say myself, and this may sound provocative and even arrogant, but if you don’t like Marnie, you don’t really like Hitchcock. I would go further than that and say if you don’t love Marnie, you don’t really love cinema.

—Robin Wood, British-Canadian author, educator, and film critic

One of the more progressive-minded films in the entire Hitchcock repertoire, and one that stands alone in exhibiting such deeply problematical insight into disturbing sexual trends within the confines of marriage, especially in earlier eras when divorce was not an option and so many marriages were forced or family determined and *not* the choice of the woman, expressing the psychological horrors faced by so many women who abhor the idea of having to have sex with a man they neither love nor even like, where forced sex is paramount to rape.  Way ahead of its time, this film delves into that subject matter with a cold analytic intelligence, without the least bit of salacious material ever shown onscreen.  Unlike Psycho (1960), which was thrillingly entertaining, this is one of the few Hitchcock films without any graphic sex or violence (until a finale), yet the audience remains riveted to the screen throughout based on the complicated depth of character development in one of the director’s longest and most troublesome films.  While something of a critical and commercial failure at the time of its release, where critic Pauline Kael called it “scraping bottom” or The New York Times “the most disappointing film in years,” its standing has only grown over time, with profits more than doubling its original budget, where some, like film critic Robin Wood in his book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, now consider it Hitchcock’s last masterpiece, a view I’m inclined to share.  Starring Tippi Hedren from his previous film The Birds (1963), it is the last time a trademark cool, icy Hitchcock blond would be the centerpiece in one of his films, the final film working with legendary composer Bernard Hermann, who wrote an excellent score, also the final film working with Robert Burks, who became known as Hitchcock’s cinematographer, having worked with him on nearly every film since Strangers On a Train (1951).  The use of color plays such a significant role in this film, especially the color red, which reflects Hedren’s deeply repressed traumatic memories, used in much the same way by Nicolas Roeg in Don't Look Now (1973), where red is boldly and expressly used to reflect the psychic visions of a blind girl.  As MARNIE is a perverse love story, the film may hold up a mirror to Hitchcock’s own personal obsession in his relationship to actress Hedren, who allegedly rejected the director’s advances, though it plays out onscreen in a decidedly different fashion.            

To hear Hedren’s side of it, she considers Hitchcock a misogynist and claims the overcontrolling director effectively ended her career by controlling the terms of her seven-year contract, refusing to cast her and preventing her from working anywhere else immediately following this film, where she’s worked steadily afterwards, but never again approaching this level of prominence.  She has called Hitchcock a “sad character, evil and deviant, almost to the point of dangerous.”  Her views are shared by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who concluded an interview with Hitchcock puffing continuously on his cigar at Cannes, as he was there for the premiere of The Birds in 1963: “With all your cordial humor, your nice round face, your nice innocent paunch, you are the most wicked, cruel man I have ever met.”  Interesting, then, that monstrous male behavior, real or imagined, is the subject of the film.  Something of a more intimate exposé of Janet Leigh’s petty larceny in Psycho (1960), Tippi Hedren as Marnie is a terrific character study, where only Vertigo (1958) goes as deeply into the human psyche, playing a sexually repressed, compulsive liar and thief, a consummate crook with no references, whose secretary skills and poised professionalism on the job are too good to be true, working under assumed names, becoming familiar with a company’s overall operations until after a few months she embezzles funds from her employer, usually only several thousand dollars, keeping it small enough to keep the stories out of the newspapers so as not to draw attention to herself, then moves on to another distant town where she assumes yet another identity.  The twist here is that under a different name, she is recognized by a perspective employer, Sean Connery as Mark Rutland, who has full knowledge of her latest theft and curiously decides to hire her anyway.  Something of an amateur zoologist who studies the habits of animal behavior, he becomes fascinated with Marnie’s criminal predatory practices, taking a more personal interest in her as well, spending time together where he observes she has a strange unnatural fear of thunderstorms, knocking on the wall, and the color red. 

Nonetheless, after stealthily catching her in the act of stealing from his company as well, rather than turning her into the police, he coerces her to marry him instead, which is against every instinct she has, but she’s blackmailed to understand it’s either that or jail, whereupon Rutland proceeds to scientifically place her inside a box like a specimen and place her under a microscope.  Marnie, of course, feels violated in every conceivable way imaginable and continually expresses her disgust with him, literally loathing the day they ever met.  Yet they’re off on a honeymoon sea cruise where the happy couple will literally disappear off the face of the earth for a few weeks in a state of wedding bliss.  After making it painfully clear she despises the sexual touch of a man, Rutland honors her privacy for awhile, attempting to win some degree of trust, before eventually having his way with her in an insinuated offscreen rape, leading to a subsequent failed suicide attempt the following morning.  Adapted from a 1961 novel by English author Winston Graham, where female screenwriter Jay Presson Allen replaced the original writer Evan Hunter who found it difficult to write the sexual material, believing the rape scene was unconscionable and would make Rutland an unsympathetic character, but this is precisely what drew Hitchcock to the material, where so much of this film provides a woman’s embattled point of view, uniquely different from the male perspective in Vertigo.  The irony, of course, is that Connery had already played two roles as the ever seductive, impossible to resist James Bond in DR. NO (1962) and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963).  Nonetheless, Marnie remains adamantly defiant in her resistance to Rutland, never being able to make a move without him, feeling suffocatingly restricted by his constant presence, where in many ways she feels like a caged animal.  Hedren brings a certain repulsed indignation to the accumulated tension in her character that feels altogether real and psychologically captivating, becoming almost unbearable at times due to the level of her utter contempt for Rutland’s continuing persistence.  There’s literally nothing in Hitchcock that has ever delved as deeply into such personally hostile and forbidden territory, where as Marnie rightly points out, “I’m sick?!  Well, take a look at yourself!” 

This is extremely provocative material coming prior to any cultural debate on feminism or the Women’s Liberation Movement, which certainly challenged existing Freudian views, where one must acknowledge the film illustrates a truly painful portrait of a male paternalistic view and the effect it has on women, refusing to accept no for an answer, literally forcing a woman to comply with male demands, where if anything, Mark and Marnie’s out of control, dysfunctional relationship resembles that of a jailer and his prisoner.  The fact that she’s a thief does not justify such extreme aberrant behavior, where rape offers no potential cure.  The act is sufficiently unpleasant that it leads Marnie to make a desperate attempt on her own life.  The film makes no attempt to address the possibility that Marnie could simply be a lesbian, as if she could be fucked into male submission, but instead suggests she’s frigid and cannot experience pleasure from sex, but only through her compulsive need to steal.  Hitchcock’s film deserves praise for refusing to conform to expectations, as he instead takes us into suppressed emotional hysteria territory, literally delving into Freudian extrapolation where Marnie’s internal world spins out of control, much of it shown using German Expressionist techniques, such as the use of color and light, also the artificial look of the thunderstorms and the looming presence of an over-sized ship at the end of the block, all but blocking the exits, creating the illusion of a trapped existence.   

One would have to suggest Freud’s equally paternalistic views provide yet another layer of the male dominated need to control, albeit one reflected from the erudite, ivory tower world of academia, continuing Hitchcock’s class consciousness argument raised in Dial M for Murder (1954), where intelligentsia is used to manipulate, and in this case control women in society.  Freud acknowledges that sexuality is a crucial problem of modern life, but his rationale for analysis and treatment have largely been disavowed due to the prevailing societal acceptance of male superiority in the era that he lived, continuing to straightjacket the views and feelings of women through a kind of psychoanalytic prism that doesn’t exist, unable to comprehend, for instance, the widespread unhappiness of traumatized women in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, despite living in material comfort. Hitchcock’s film brilliantly disturbs the hornets nest, as sexual relations are no better understood today than when this film was made.  Due to the depths of the alienated exploration, however, in many ways Hitchcock’s MARNIE is like a female version of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).  Even if she were to somehow regain some sense of balance in her life, like Norman Bates smothering mother in Psycho, her emotionally cold and distant mother along with terrifying childhood experiences have left her imprinted with multiple layers of lifelong trauma that would be very difficult (but not impossible) to overcome.  What largely stands out about the film, however, is not Marnie’s individual neuroses, but the symptomatic suppression of women as a societal ailment, which coming from an overcontrolling, male dominating director like Hitchcock is simply astonishing.