Alfred Hitchcock, “Marnie” (1964)
Not a bad psychological thriller / character study of a compulsive kleptomaniac with deep-seated fears and flashback memories, this film is very like the earlier “Vertigo” in some ways but shows evidence of a decline in Hitchcock’s film-making powers. The look of the film is of a beautiful and quite epic fantasy though the subject is highly personal and on paper best suited to a scaled-down approach. The title character Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a young woman who works for one employer after another using various assumed identities with intent to steal from each employer she works for. At the beginning of the film she’s just fleeced one employer, Strutt, changed her appearance and name, and then applies for a job with another employer, little knowing the connection it has with Strutt. She’s accepted by Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) at the firm and starts work as a typist but in a short while she’s gone and pilfered money from the company safe. Rutland quickly discovers the theft and, intrigued by her nature, forces Marnie to marry him. He discovers she has various psychological issues and determines to find out the cause of them so that she can be healed and become a normal human being.
The movie looks unreal and several scenes, in particular the horse-riding scenes, seem bizarre and old-fashioned but it’s all meant to reflect Marnie’s disturbed point of view and experience of the world around her. She is more at ease with animals and especially with horses (always a handy symbol of sexuality: in Marnie’s case the love of horses might indicate a sexual immaturity) than with humans, particularly men whom she fears and will not allow to touch her. Episodes in which she experiences flashback memories with their resulting traumas whenever she sees blood or bright red colours are highlighted with red filters over the camera lens, a ploy carried over from “Vertigo” where filters of several colours were used in the psychedelic dream sequence. The role is a complicated one and Hedren carries it off as best she can: she often goes blank in scenes where other actors might over-act and contort their faces in extreme emotion but then it’s hard to predict how disturbed individuals might react in situations that cause anxiety to them. Her icy silvery-blonde looks at least are ideal for the role: she seems a vulnerable child-woman whose normal development has been stymied by trauma, repressed memory and a neglectful mother (Louise Latham) who has little understanding of her daughter’s needs.
The other significant role of Mark Rutland is played well by Connery who combines charisma and charm with a controlling and predatory nature. His motive for wanting to protect and at the same time train Marnie to become a “normal” functioning human is never clear and it seems he has a clinical if creepy scientific interest in changing and controlling her. He may be an investigator with an interest in animal psychology, having studied zoology, but then not all such students would apply their learning to manipulate humans! He is dead keen on finding the source of Marnie’s kleptomania, sexual frigidity and phobias and how he finds out through his contacts in Philadelphia and Baltimore about a past murder case and puts two and two together to get an answer beyond four appears rather too easy to be realistic. There is a parallel with Hitchcock’s earlier movie “Vertigo” in which a detective makes over a young woman into his ideal love object: the control over Marnie is more subtle and looks far less sinister than that movie and though it’s arguable that Marnie must some day face her fears and seek help, the way she’s forced to confront her past by Mark and the methods he uses can be just abusive as the detective Scotty’s control of the young woman Judy. Perhaps Mark is attracted to Marnie precisely because her disorders make her the intelligent, intriguing and headstrong individual she is. The irony for Marnie is that she’ll be no different from other “normal” women (read dutiful Stepford-wife types) once she is “cured” of her disorders and Mark will get bored with her and cast her aside for another flawed woman to study and manipulate.
Of the minor characters, Mark’s sister-in-law Lil (Diane Baker) hasn’t much to do besides smoulder with what looks like desire for or resentment at Marnie – there’s possibly a hint of unacknowledged lesbian-ish desire there – and invite the Strutts for dinner behind Mark and Marnie’s backs for who knows what reason. What Lil happens to be doing at her father-in-law’s home with her husband well out of the picture (literally) is never made clear though Dad and Mark don’t mind having her around. What the whole family is doing living together, Dad, two brothers and their presumed spouses, isn’t clear though the house has plenty of room for them all and a whole batch of guests for a fox-hunting weekend.
The Freudian psychology covered in the movie looks simplistic and is applied in a way that explains everything about Marnie’s disturbed inner world very glibly. A diagnosis that would take a trained psychoanalyst several years to reach and several hundred or a couple thousand dollars each year to be coughed up by the patient takes several minutes for an amateur sleuth to work out with the help of a few textbooks and a visit to the patient’s mum, no fee charged. Perhaps that says something about Hitchcock’s opinion of psychoanalysis in particular and psychiatry generally! Marnie’s association with horses and what that implies about her nature, desire for freedom and individuality, and her sexuality is laboured over and over throughout the film. The scene in which Marnie is forced to shoot a horse becomes all the more shocking and tragic because in essence she is giving up her freedom.
As well as the emphasis on Freudian psychology and the subject of men’s control over women under the appearance of romantic love and attachment, familiar Hitchcock themes include the fragility and fluidity of identity (Marnie takes on and drops several identities at will); deception in the form of thievery, sexual blackmail, identity fraud; the portrayal of sexuality by symbolic means (in this movie, through horses); the association of sex with violence and bloodshed; and the influence of a mother on her child’s psyche. As in “North by Northwest” and “Psycho”, romantic attraction and sex become a business transaction: Mark blackmails Marnie into marriage on the threat of turning her over to the police.
Technically the film is very well done with a lavish and colourful style, a musical soundtrack that is romantic and sometimes very annoyingly intrusive and Hitchcock’s typical filming methods and tricks which include the voyeuristic camera sneaking on Marnie as she searches for Mark’s safe near the film’s end and a completely silent scene of Marnie on one side of the camera’s view stealing money from her new employer while on the other side of the camera’s view the cleaner is mopping the floor. (The humour behind this scene is that the cleaner is deaf, hence the complete silence.) The main flaw though is that several scenes are very long and the editing throughout the film could have been tightened up much more, chopping at least 15 minutes off the film’s 2-hour running-time. Filming techniques that were innovative and fresh when used in films like “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest” now seem repetitive, awkward and heavy-handed.
In its ideas and style, “Marnie” is a rehash of “Vertigo” which was a better film technically. “Marnie” may be a subtler creation with respect to theme but in other respects it repeats some of Hitchcock’s themes, ideas and motifs from “Vertigo”, “North by Northwest” and “Psycho” in a ham-fisted way. If only it weren’t so long and repetitive, “Marnie” might have been a great film: the acting performances are very good if not great and the sets are colourful and hyper-real. The world in which Marnie and Mark move is a place of glamour, wealth and privilege where money can buy freedom, keep people away from police and solve problems.