Seeing that Hitchcock’s film, Marnie, was about to leave Netflix, I decided to give it a watch. It’s kind of an odd film.
Tippi Hedren is Marnie. She occasionally gets a job at a business, hangs around long enough to figure out how to rob it (eg get the safe combination), robs it, and then disappears. After a job, she goes to visit her mother, who seems strangely distant to her.
Getting the itch again, she gets a job at Rutland Publishing. There’s only one problem. The owner, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), was a client at the previous business that Marnie robbed and recognizes her. Intrigued, he encourages the manager to hire her.
Sure enough, Marnie is up to her old tricks and robs the company. Mark tracks her down and says that he knows who she is. He says that he’s already replaced the money that she stole and will not turn her in if she agrees to marry him. Yes, you read that right. Trapped, she agrees.
On their honeymoon, Mark discovers that Marnie hates and fears all men. She loathes being touched by them. At first sympathetic, later there is certainly an implication (implication because this is a Hays Code era film) that Mark rapes Marnie. The next morning, she attempts suicide but Mark saves her.
Their marriage is off to a rollicking start. Mark also finds out that Marnie is terrified of thunderstorms and the color red. She is a serial liar. Despite all of that, Mark, for some reason, is still infatuated with her. He begins to read abnormal psychology books in an attempt to understand her. She angrily resists all attempts to be psychoanalyzed by him.
The mystery becomes clearer when Mark discovers that Marnie’s mom, of whom Marnie has claimed is dead, is actually alive in Baltimore. Mark forces Marnie to visit her mother. During a dramatic thunderstorm, her mom recounts the childhood tragedy that unlocks the reasons behind Marnie’s phobias and hatred of men. Perhaps the unlocked memory will now allow her to move on.
The film was kind of meh. This film was the first time that I really saw the impact that German Expressionism had on Hitchcock. The cinematography was full of interesting shadows and angular backgrounds. Since German Expressionism came of age in the 1920s, it was interesting to see it expressed in technicolor.
Although very different women, this film reminded me of his earlier film Rebecca. Both involved a sexually naïve woman essentially being bum rushed into marriage, while at the same time, another woman actively tries to destroy the marriage.
On the not so good side, the acting was wooden. Hedren did good work as the icy socialite in The Birds. Here she is in over her head trying to convey all of the emotional and psychological complexities of Marnie. Similarly, Connery is lost portraying Rutland. He is not convincing in expressing his love for Marnie or expressing exasperation at her many lies. At least at this point in his career, he simply doesn’t have much emotional range beyond chiseled good looks.
The portrayal of Rutland in 2023 is problematic. I kind of wish that I had a time machine to watch it from a 1964 perspective. I’d guess, from that perspective, that Rutland is a good guy. Sure he forces her into marriage, but he has her best interests at heart, right? After all, he does it all for love.
Looking from 2023, he’s a problem. He forces her into marriage. He pretty clearly rapes her when she rejects him. She pleads with him to let her go but he refuses. With no psychological experience, he forces her to relive her foundational traumatic memory. Connery’s infamous remarks about the occasional need to slap women make many scenes in this film now uncomfortable.
Now that I’ve watched many Hitchcock films, one of the main things that I was thinking about as I was watching is how seemingly obsessed he was with psychology. I’m not talking about subtleties like themes or settings. In many of his films, the psychology is front and center.
Here is just a sampling:
Marnie: I know that I just talked about it. The film is rife with phobias, dreams / nightmares, neuroses, repressed memories, and sexual dysfunction. Connery is seen reading several psychology books and discourses at length with Marnie about her need for psychiatric attention. At one point, they even do a word association exercise.
Spellbound: A good chunk of this film actually takes place at a mental asylum. The main characters are all psychiatrists. One of the characters even kind of looks like Sigmund Freud. Characters have phobias and amnesia, all of which is explainable and, ultimately, curable through psychological means.
Rope: This one might be a stretch but the two murderers, especially Brandon, suffer from Narcissist Personality Disorder. This is best exemplified by Brandon’s claim that he is a superman somehow above murder. This continues on until the one person who Brandon wishes to impress above all others angrily rejects him premise.
Vertigo: This, as well as the next one, are the most famous. After a traumatic experience, Scottie Ferguson now has a severe fear of heights. It is only through experiencing a different traumatic experience that Ferguson can overcome his fear.
Psycho: This is the clearest example. After all, the film literally ends with a psychiatrist’s extended exposition of the case of Norman Bates and his mother.
There’s some other, not quite so obvious, examples that I could reference. I’m thinking of films such as Frenzy and Strangers on a Train.
I don’t know enough about Hitchcock to understand if he was particularly interested in the study of psychology or if he just happened to be plugged into the cultural zeitgeist of the time. It was clearly a subject that he found himself returning to many times.
dorkenstein 