Nutshell: Marnie (1964) is kind of a big, glossy Tennessee Williams soap opera: It’s silly when it should be gritty. Marnie (Hedren) takes an office job in a new town, works her way up to a position of trust, then steals all the money in the safe and splits. She changes her name and hair color and gets a job in some other city to do it all over again. The money she steals goes to her disabled mother living in a slum in Boston, sort of. She buys her a mink stoll, which is exactly what all of the folks living in the slums need. The hair steals the show, and is often so distracting you lose track of the plot.

 

Marnie is set in New England, but seems to take place in some version of the South, just without the mint juleps and hoop skirts. People have grand balls, ride horses and go on fox hunts. Marnie owns a horse that is boarded while she’s off stealing money in different-colored overly coiffed hairdos. When Marnie, light red hair, interviews for a new job, the boss, widower Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), thinks he recognizes her as the brunette who robbed his friend’s company. He hires her, even though her résumé is light, and promotes her to a position of trust where she has access to the safe. Before Mark took over his father’s company, he was studying to be a zoologist and all of this is some kind of experiment to see how long it takes her to rip him off. I guess when you’re a handsome rich dude, you do experiments like this -- I wouldn’t know.

 

As Mark studies Marnie, he notes all of her strange quirks. She can’t stand the color red; whenever she sees it, the whole screen goes red and the image is tinted red for a moment afterwards. (The vinyl soundtrack album was a bright red disk.) Thunder and lightning totally freak her out. She cowers in the corner like a dog. She can’t stand to be touched by men. Eventually she robs him and runs away. Instead of having her arrested, however, he blackmails her into marrying him. Now keep in mind that Mark is a chick magnet. This is prime James Bond-era Connery, and he could have any woman he wants. In fact, his dead wife’s sister (Diane Baker) who lives in his grand country home throws herself at him constantly, and she’s hot. So when Mark decides to marry a virgin klepto with color red and lightning issues, you wonder, “what’s up with that?”

 

They take a honeymoon cruise where there is no honeymoon until Mark basically rapes his wife -- she just lays there like a corpse. When they return from the cruise, the soap opera kicks into high gear. The dead wife’s sister begins investigating Marnie’s past, Mark’s buddy who was robbed by the brunette version of Marnie is invited to a grand ball, Marnie’s horse breaks a leg on a fox hunt after Marnie sees the color red on the Huntmaster’s vest, and Marnie grabs herself a gun and blasts the horse. All sorts of silly, soapy complications, and all the while Mark continues his study. 

 

 

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!Eventually Mark figures it all out, and we get our big Tennessee Williams family secret revealed. He takes Marnie back to her mother’s slum apartment where her Carrie White-style, ultra-religious mom reveals she was a filthy whore who screwed an army of sailors including a young Bruce Dern. We see Dern, as a sailor, hug a child version of Marnie (also with overdone hair). It’s implied that maybe he does more, so Marnie’s filthy whore mom tries to kill him. When she fails, and Dern starts beating on her, child Marnie grabs a fire poker and kills horny sailor Bruce Dern, red blood flowing, lightning flashing, thunder crashing.Now that Marnie has gotten that off her chest, she hugs Mark and you just know that whole frigid thing is over and they’re going to go home and get it on. “Don’t touch the hair!”

 

Hitch Appearance: Boring -- he comes out of a hotel room.

 

Experiment: Hitchcock seems to be experimenting with suggestive and subliminal images. There are some interesting images in the film, including the opening shot of a purse that looks like female genitalia (there's a pun in there somewhere), and some other suggestive shots throughout the film. Something kinky about Marnie riding bareback on her horse Forio in a skirt -- the shots focus on bare flesh and horse mane.

 

Great Scenes: Again, a shortage of great scenes kills this film. When Marnie robs Mark’s safe, there’s a little suspense when a cleaning lady mopping the floor of the office causes her to take off her shoes and sneak out, but she drops a shoe! This scene is almost a split screen with Marnie stealing and sneaking out on the right side, a wall splitting the screen, and the cleaning lady mopping on the left side. But this whole scene goes to hell after Marnie drops her shoe, making a loud noise, and the cleaning lady does nothing. Hey, she’s deaf! This removes any suspense the scene may have built, but the split screen concept is kind of cool, and probably influenced Brain DePalma. The set pieces -- the fox hunt, the grand ball, the horse races -- all seem soapy and silly instead of exciting and interesting. When she shoots her horse, the gun in her hand might have been used for suspense, but it’s just kind of there. The big revelation at the end doesn’t really work because -- even though Marnie has all of these quirks -- the film spends more time on her hair than her mysterious background. So the revelation doesn’t shock us or suddenly solve the big mystery, it’s just kind of there. Hey, ultra-religious mom was a filthy whore! I don’t care. It is difficult to care about Marnie, because she always seems non-human. Distant, plastic, cold.

 

Sound Track: Lush, beautiful Bernard Herrmann score. If the film sometimes seems like Hitch was trying to find some way to remake Vertigo, the score does a great job of making it seem like Vertigo 2: The Revenge. Marnie isn’t as good as Spellbound, another Hitch film about a character with a repressed memory (and the main film parodied by Mel Brooks in High Anxiety). The best things about Marnie are that bright red vinyl disk with Herrmann’s score (his last to be heard on a Hitchcock film), and the fact that, since we’re moving backwards through Hitch movies, the best films are on the horizon.

 

-----------------------------------------------------

 

William C. Martell has written 19 produced films for cable and video, including three HBO World Premieres, a pair of Showtime films, the thriller Hard Evidence (Warner Bros.), and the family film Invisible Mom. He is the author of The Secrets of Action Screenwriting and can be reached at Scriptsecrets.net. A version of this post appeared on Scriptsecrets.net.   

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment