What is Marnie (film)?

Marnie
Original film poster for Marnie
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited)
Written by	Jay Presson Allen
Starring	Tippi Hedren Sean Connery Diane Baker Martin Gabel Louise Latham Bob Sweeney Bruce Dern Alan Napier
Music by	Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography	Robert Burks
Editing by	George Tomasini
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	July 22, 1964
Running time	130 min.
Language	English
Budget	US$ 3,000,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the novel Marnie by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. The original music score was composed by Bernard Hermann.

Plot summary

Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a troubled young woman who has an unnatural fear and mistrust of men, thunderstorms and the color red. She is also a compulsive thief. She uses her charms on Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel) to get a job without references. Then late one night, she steals the contents of the company safe and disappears.

Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a widower who owns a large printing company, is a good customer of Strutt's. He learns about the theft from the victim, and remembers the woman. So when Marnie applies for a job at his company, he is intrigued. He is robbed too, but unlike Strutt, Mark manages to track Marnie down. Instead of handing her over to the police, he blackmails her into marrying him.

On their honeymoon, he finds out about her frigidity. At first, he respects her condition, but her undisguised hostility to him incites him to rape her. The next morning, she tries to commit suicide, but she does not succeed, as Mark finds her in time.

He attempts to discover the reasons behind Marnie's behavior. In the end, Marnie and Mark learn that her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), had been a prostitute. When Marnie was six years old, one of her mother's clients (a sailor played by Bruce Dern) had tried to calm her after she became frightened by a storm. Bernice thought he was trying to molest her daughter and began attacking him. Seeing her mother struggling with the man, Marnie struck him with a fireplace poker, killing him. The bloodshed led to her fear of the color red, as a result. Once the origin of her fears is revealed, Marnie decides she wants to try to make her marriage work.

Responses

The movie was not as successful in theatres as other Hitchcock productions, although it did turn a profit in the UK and Italy.

Leonard Maltin has argued that Marnie was ahead of its time, while in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto describes it as Hitchcock's last masterpiece.

The film's special effects are often criticized as unconvincing, with critics noting such things as obvious matte paintings and back projection. However, in a making-of documentary on the DVD, Robin Wood, author of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, argues that they can be defended if one notes the roots of the film in German Expressionism:

"[Hitchcock] worked in German studios at first, in the silent period. Very early on when he started making films, he saw Fritz Lang's German silent movies; he was enormously influenced by that, and Marnie is basically an expressionist film in many ways. Things like scarlet suffusions over the screen, back-projection and backdrops, artificial-looking thunderstorms—these are expressionist devices and one has to accept them. If one doesn't accept them then one doesn't understand and can't possibly like Hitchcock."

Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto said something very similar in his book The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, then changed his story in his later biography of the filmmaker, claiming that the film was technically sloppy not because Hitchcock was going for an elaborate, quasi-Expressionistic feel, but because after his advances to Tippi Hedren had been rebuffed, he lost all interest in the film. In an August 2006 article in The Guardian, Hedren, while not confirming this story, said that when she told Hitchcock that she wanted to be released from her contract, he replied, "Well, I'll ruin your career."^[1]

Cast

• Tippi Hedren as Marnie Edgar. In Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, Tony Lee Moral revealed that a studio executive at Paramount suggested actress Lee Remick to Hitchcock for the title role. Eva Marie Saint, star of Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) and Susan Hampshire unsuccessfully pursued the role. Hitchcock also considered two other actresses who were, like Hedren, under personal contract to him, Vera Miles and Claire Griswold, wife of director/actor Sydney Pollack. Hitchcock originally offered the role to Grace Kelly in 1962, by then Princess Grace of Monaco, and she agreed. However, residents of Monaco objected to her appearing in a film, especially as a disturbed kleptomaniac. Also, when Kelly married Prince Rainier in 1956, she had not fulfilled her MGM contract, thus MGM could have prevented her appearance in any feature film unless she fulfilled her contract to MGM first. Hitchcock was so upset by these complications that he put Marnie aside to work on The Birds (1963). Future soap opera actress Melody Thomas played the uncredited role of Marnie as a child in the flashbacks. In an interview, actress Catherine Deneuve indicated that she would have loved to have played Marnie.^[2]
• Sean Connery as Mark Rutland.
• Diane Baker as Lil Mainwaring, Mark's sister-in-law.
• Louise Latham as Bernice Edgar.
• Martin Gabel as Sidney Strutt, one of Marnie's victims.
• Bruce Dern as the Sailor who traumatizes Marnie.
• Alan Napier as Mr. Rutland, Mark's father who likes Horn & Hardardt cake.
• Alfred Hitchcock's cameo is a signature occurrence in most of his films. He can be seen five minutes into the film, entering from the left of a hotel corridor after Marnie passes by.

Production

In a making-of documentary on the DVD release, unit manager Hilton A. Green explains that shooting had been scheduled to begin on Monday, November 25, 1963, but had to be postponed because the nation was in mourning for John F. Kennedy.

Marnie was the final Hitchcock film scored by Bernard Herrmann and the composer included excerpts from the music in his special album for Decca Records. Herrmann was to have scored Hitchcock's next film, Torn Curtain, until he failed to write the jazzy score that Universal demanded and Hitchcock was forced to fire him; some of the music Herrmann had written was later included in a tribute to the composer by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra released by Sony Records.

Pop culture reference(s)

The band Violets released a single titled "Foreo" in February 2007; the title refers to Marnie's horse. (Although the song refers to Marnie, the music video contains images inspired by the opening credits to Vertigo).^[3]

References

External links

• Marnie at All Movie Guide
• DVD Review of Marnie
• 2005 interview with Tippi Hedren, commenting on working with Hitchcock on The Birds and Marnie
• Complete list of actors who were considered for roles

•  • [ e] Films directed by Alfred Hitchcock
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