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.   

The Trip

THE TRIP – made for TV                   A-                   

Great Britain  (107 mi)  2010  d:  Michael Winterbottom

Quite simply the funniest film seen all year, a masterwork of spontaneous impressions, all of which call into question the legitimacy of one’s identity, beautifully unraveling in a free form exhibition of improvised conversations that seamlessly moves from one fictitious movie character to another, from Michael Caine to Al Pacino, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, Alec Guinness, Woody Allen and more, supplanting the real lives of two friends, Steve Coogan (as himself) and Rob Bryden, who is his fifth or sixth, but most likely his last desperate choice as a traveling companion, as they go on a weeklong road trip together across Northern England, all expenses paid by a British newspaper The Observer, to review some of the nation’s most prestigious, upscale restaurants in gorgeously posh historic accommodations set throughout the painterly English landscapes.  Can anyone think SIDEWAYS (2004)?  Coogan initially wanted to go with his girl friend (Margo Stilley) as an attempt to rekindle their lost romance, but she’s too busy trying to establish her own career, so he’s left frantically searching at the last moment for an acceptable fill-in.  Bryden, like Thomas Hayden Church, is utterly brilliant as the mad side kick, giving an incomparable performance that is among the best of the year, where every improvised utterance is a masterwork of comic art that seemingly rolls off his tongue with the ease of talking.  But it’s not just comic timing and flair, as he also reads poems or breaks into song at a moment’s notice, even memorizing bits of literary phrase that are appropriate for the historic realm they are exploring.  Coogan, ever the miserablist, tries not to laugh or show appreciation, as if he’s paid to keep a straight face, refusing to allow anyone to upstage him, but instead heaps as much scorn and abuse his friend’s way as he can, acting as though he is terrible company, but at times they each try to outdo the other’s impressions in a comic laugh off, where the audience is simply delighted at how good these guys really are.  Some of the best moments are when the guys do laugh, where they can’t help themselves, but this doesn’t happen very often, where Coogan is bound and determined to see his friend as a source of endless aggravation and misery.    

Initially shot as a 3-hour British TV series, where each of six visits is a half-hour episode, this is a streamlined version which undoubtedly leaves out choice material, and without it, one can only wonder what’s missing?  So one would guess the original source material would be the way to go, but that’s not how it’s being released in America where only the truncated version is offered.  Even as is, this is unforgettable stuff, endlessly hilarious and filled with intelligent wisecracking wit.  This is also the most gorgeously filmed Winterbottom film since his first real movie success, JUDE (1996), which accentuated with dizzying camera movement the sweeping enormity of the land, and these remain, while at opposite ends of the spectrum, one a wrenching uncompromising tragedy and the other funny as hell, displaying an underlying dry wit, his two best films, largely due to the intensely personal nature of the material.  Here as well, shot by Ben Smithard, the unending beauty of the landscape is a remarkable attraction, seen as their Range Rover SUV whizzes through the curvature of the narrow roadways, often with stone walls on each side of the road, with rolling hills heading off into the horizon, occasionally seen through the mist of an everpresent fog.  Part of the story is watching these guys try to connect back home after dinner each night through the use of a phone, where Bryden induces various sex fantasies with his wife while lying in bed, not at all bashful about embellishing the voices of various celebrity characters, while Coogan is continually seen wandering aimlessly out in the high grass somewhere trying to obtain phone reception, where his conversations are wrought with great difficulty, usually ending badly, where he appears to be the most friendless guy in the universe.  The irony, of course, is that right in front of where he’s standing are some of the most unbelievably gorgeous landscape images, usually in front of a placid lake with the mist rolling by that continually changes the face of the horizon, with amazingly perfect painterly compositions that reflect the still life quality of the moment.    

Some of the food offerings are an amazingly pretentious display of overkill, where it appears grass is included with every serving of a 10-course meal, always accompanied by bottles of wine, where in every instance they are given the best window seat.  Not once do we ever see Coogan do any writing on this assignment, where he instead continually moans and bitches about the apparently stalled state of his career or how his girl friend is not there, while the ever upbeat Bryden appears to be having the time of his life.  Both these guys are evenly matched, intelligent, witty, spontaneous, imperfect, openly flawed, yet they seem to use humor to rise above the moment, finding their humanity in their various impressions.  Rarely does Coogan ever have dinner with Rob Bryden, as instead he’s met with a host of interchangeable characters that eventually drive him batty.  Initially he tries to keep up, matching impression for impression, insisting his are superior, but when we see him alone in his room at night attempting to master various Bryden voice inflections, the audience knows he’s been outdone.  Coogan can be vicious when given the chance, never having a kind word to say about anyone else, while continually seeing himself with delusions of grandeur, actually seeing himself as the Don Quixote of Britain.  Not a chance, as that role would have to go to Terry Gilliam whose lifetime projects have continually been sabotaged and destroyed, seemingly by acts of God.  Coogan shows a great deal of disenchantment with himself when he’s alone, where these solitary moments reflect an off camera persona that is quite revealing, the picture of middle aged frustration, quite a contrast to having to live up to his wish fulfillment dream sequence with Ben Stiller telling him all the American directors are lined up and can’t wait to work with him, which sadly, he has to wake up to feeling more isolated and never more alone.  Once back home in the empty, stainless steel surroundings of his overpriced luxury apartment with sliding glass doors and a balcony overlooking the highway construction project, it appears his life will have to remain a similar project in the making.