For its first 45 minutes, Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie threatens to be one of the greatest movies ever made. It can't sustain the icy crystalline perfection of its first half and devolves into explanations that are wholly unnecessary to the movie's dream logic. Hitchcock is too much of a rationalist and feels he has to explain the frigid theorems that his movie poses. In this regard, the director seems too tightly rooted in the cozy conventions of British crime fiction -- a riddle is posed to be solved. His greatest films don't have solutions: there is no accounting for what happens in The Birds and the solution in Vertigo, arriving in the very middle of the movie doesn't explain what happens in its second half and, furthermore, this ratiocinative account is comically delirious itself. Marnie tries to resolve the problem that it poses -- but the enigma that he film presents is far deeper and more disturbing than the trite resolution featured in the film which pretends to solve all problems but merely shoves them aside for the consolation of a happy ending that is obviously specious.
The film's opening shot is instantly memorable -- some kind of bright yellow vulva is being carried under a woman's arm. The vulva moves away from the camera as the stylishly dressed woman walks to the center of a eerily silent and still train platform. This yellow form turns out to be a purse, with phallic keys one of the central visual leit motifs in the film. The woman is Marnie, a role played with enormous bravery by Tippi Hedren. She has just stolen a sum of about $10,000 from her employer. Like Marian Crane in Psycho, she is on the run. But as Hitchcock's narrative of nightmarish flight and pursuit show us -- ultimately, there's no place to hide: she can't escape herself and her compulsions. At the outset, the film shows us something that makes no sense. At a train station, Marnie puts the purse in a locker and, then, takes the key and drops it onto a grating in the floor, nudging the little steel phallus into the darkness between the bars with her spike heel. Why would she do this? The suggestion is that money is not the motive for her crime. After changing her hair color -- she's naturally blonde -- in a rapturous reveal (it's the first time we see her face), Marnie rides a big black horse in front of Hitchcock's typically dreamlike rear projection. She bobs up and down as if having sex while a frieze of background unrelated to the lighting where she is moving is dragged along behind her., Then, she goes to Baltimore to visit her mother, a woman who lives on a street angling down toward a bizarre-looking harbor where a big ship is always pulled up next to the neighborhood, parked like one of the big cars of the era -- the film was made in 1964. The scenes with Marnie's mother have a quality of utter clarity and complete horror, a hellish atmosphere of damnation and torment. In Psycho, we imagine what Norman Bates' relationship was like with his mother -- here Hitchcock stages the thing outright and it's a ghastly spectacle to behold. (Indeed, in one shot, the shadowy form of the dreadful mother, backlit, occupies a door frame, reiterating a scene in Psycho.) Marnie's mother speaks with a faint Southern accent, has a bad limp, and alternates between demented denunciations of her daughter for trying to attract men and appeals for love which she, then, rebuffs. The whole episode takes place with nightmarish intensity. Marnie has used her sex appeal to seduce men into hiring her as a secretary or assistant -- but, then, she compulsively steals from them and changes her identity before proceeding to her next victim.
The killer returns to the scene of the crime and Marnie is driven by some kind of odd compulsion to seek a job with a man named Mark Rutland, one of Hitchcock's playboy businessmen, although with overtones in his speech of the sinister spy acted by James Mason in North by Northwest. No less than Marnie, Rutland is a complete puzzle. He has a Gothic family centered around his father, an old libertine. (Rutland's family with its strange obsessive emotional crosscurrents seems to mirror in some ways the totally oppressive relationship between Marnie and her demanding, vicious mother.) Rutland, played by Sean Connery, has previously met Marnie on the premises of her previous victim's business and so the woman's application for work at the family publishing business has a dream-logic -- she is putting herself into a situation where her criminal conduct will certainly be discovered and punished. And, indeed, when Marnie steals from Rutland, he recalls her from the place where she earlier worked and after she has opened his safe and taken another $10,000, he hunts her down, suddenly appearing out of nowhere (again like a nightmare force of retribution) when she is ecstatically riding her big black stallion. It is here where the movie slides into delirium too excessive even for Hitchcock. Instead of having Marnie arrested, Rutland blackmails her into marriage. He's become obsessed with her and like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo intends to spend the second half of the movie making her into his own creation. In fact, Rutland's coerced marriage is the worst punishment that could be conceived for Marnie -- she's sexually frigid and can't abide being touched by men (except when seducing them for their money) and her honeymoon with her new husband will be a form of punishment, even torture. Her husband will demand sex and she will resist until overcome. Then, her disgust at the sexual act will drive her to suicide. This seems to be the film's nightmare logic. Rutland (the name tells us everything we need to know) takes her on a honeymoon voyage to Fiji. Trapped on the ship, he ultimately rapes her. She, then, flees the bedroom at dawn and flings herself into a swimming pool. floating face down when her husband rescues her -- but only to inflict further connubial torture on her. There's an infernal dinner party at Rutland's family mansion in which Marnie has to confront an earlier victim of her crimes -- this is one of Hitchcock's set pieces involving sinister encounters among elegantly dressed people, something like the party in Notorious. Marnie suffers from some sort of repressed memory that apparently involves the colors white and blood-red. When she sees specks of red on a white background, the film-image flares into a scarlet haze and she slips into fearsome seizures. At the house party, Marnie goes riding on a fox hunt, obsesses over the color red on a huntsman's tunic, and, then, rides away, fleeing desperately -- another extravaganza of wholly implausible and hallucinatory rear projection. She misses a jump and her big black stallion is ruined, legs broken and screaming on the ground. She pounds on a door of a house nearby, demanding a gun with which to kill the wounded animal. All of this is observed by another of Hitchcock's strangely eccentric characters -- Rutland's sister-in-law. This young woman plays the thankless role that was assigned Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo: she's haplessly in love with Rutland who is, of course, forbidden to her and, so, to get closer to the object of her desires, forms an alliance with her brother-in-law to uncover Marnie's secrets. "I can be anything you want," the young woman says: "Guerrilla fighter, perjurer, intelligence agent." Later, she suggests weirdly that she might share Rutland's obsession with Marnie: "I'm queer for liars," she inexplicably says. Rutland wants to cure Marnie, like all men thinking that his penis will be the remedy that she needs. He confronts her in a bedroom encounter in which she derisively says: "You Freud, me Jane." And she plausibly argues that he is crazier than she -- after all, he has chosen a sexually unavailable criminal for his wife. By this time, Rutland has figured out that Marnie's sexual aberration arises from some kind of repressed childhood trauma. He forces her to travel with him to the eerie street in Baltimore where the old brownstones are backed up against the icy looking harbor. There, Rutland triggers a final confrontation with Marnie's monstrous mother in which the source of his wife's derangement is revealed. This part of the movie is equal measure Spellbound and Vertigo-- particularly, the final scenes in the latter film in which Jimmy Stewart drags the unwilling Kim Novak into the tower to confront her demons and guilt. Everything is revealed -- sort of. Marnie has an abreaction that is cautiously orgasmic. Her mother's eyes are covered with a pale blue film. Rutland ushers Marnie, who the film suggests might be "cured" to the car and the storm clouds over the nightmare harbor break apart so that bright sunlight can shine on the strange toy-like set. Little girls jumping rope sing: Call for the doctor, call for nurse, call for the woman with the alligator purse. Alligator purse, of course, describes Marnie's sealed and predatory vagina. Is this a happy ending? It seems doubtful.
Parts of the film are inexplicable. It's not at all clear why Marnie's sexual repression has metamorphosed into kleptomania. We don't really see her getting a sexual charge from her crimes -- rather, the sexual climax associated with theft is transferred to scenes of her riding her stallion. Money, it seems, goes into the sealed purse of her vagina instead of a man's penis. Money in a film of this sort, in fact, is the phallus. Although the theme is not well developed, there is a hint that Marnie associates money with sex because, as it turns out, her equally repressed and sexually prudish mother was, of all things, a prostitute.
Hitchcock's mise-en-scene in this film is extraordinary, far superior to the strangely explicit and implausible plot. His characteristic effect is perfect clarity that, nonetheless, has something completely and eerily uncanny about it. Many shots "read" as entirely logical but are, nonetheless, bafflingly strange. One example must suffice for many: Hitchcock favors overhead perspectives that are curiously inert and analytical -- the equivalent, it seems, of detached psychoanalytic scrutiny. Marnie and Rutland have gone to a racetrack so that the woman can admire the horses. She asks to go to the paddock. The camera is mounted high over the location and we see an oval field where there are jockeys and horses next to a completely rectilinear grid of parked cars -- the juxtaposition of the round paddock with its chaotic action and the completely still and silent formation of cars is oddly compelling. I don't know what it means but the lucidity of the shot and its analytical precision requires that it mean something. Hitchcock dares to film Sean Connery as the movie's object of desire, it's ingenue -- he is shot to emphasize his full sensual lips and seems to be wearing long artificial eye-lashes and dark eyeliner in many close-ups. Far from seeming powerfully masculine, he appears to be strangely feminine, soft and yielding. By contrast, Hitchcock lavishes his full photographic scorn on Marnie -- she is shot in ways that make her seem hideous, an impermeable glacial mass of neurosis. There's nothing attractive about her at all -- we can't even imagine her body under the shapeless flannel night gown that she wears or her androgynous business suits. The exteriors of buildings have a sort of ominous expressivity in this film. Throughout the film, Bernard Herrmann's ultra-melodramatic score yearns and sobs and throbs and quivers. In one extraordinary scene, Rutland is dictating to Marnie on a Saturday afternoon when there is a thunderstorm that envelopes the peculiar barren-looking office building, an ancient warehouse it seems, where his publishing company is located. Suddenly a wall collapse and a huge withered tree falls into the room, smashing a collection of pre-Columbian art objects that are all that remains of Rutland's deceased first wife. The huge tree seems to have come from nowhere. If the establishing shots of the building featured trees around the building's perimeter, the viewer has forgotten this. The invading tree, black and gnarled, is like some hideous eruption of the unconscious. Just as the death of the black stallion signifies the possibility that Marnie can be rescued from her madness, the black tree bough inexplicably invading the office represents the power of obsession triggering Rutland's quest to cure her. There is a lot of bad stuff sloshing around in Hitch's head and it comes out in an uncontrolled gush in this film.
Marnie is shown in tribute to Sean Connery who died at ninety a few days before this note was written. As part of this tribute, Turner Classic Movies showed several of the actor's James Bond films, one of which, You only live Twice was made around the time that Marnie was produced. Like George Reeves, Connery fancied himself a serious actor and didn't want to be type-cast as the suave, if brutish, James Bond. I watched about a forty minutes of You Only Live Twice -- the film is unpleasant and surprisingly bad. (I wonder what erstwhile admires of these pictures think of them now.) Bond has been sent to the Orient and cavorts with a small army of geishas in antiseptic white brassieres and panties who bathe him -- it's the exact opposite of erotic, a completely sterile fantasy with no pay-off. The film is overlit and incredibly vulgar. Bond's double entendres aren't funny; their just a series of aggressively misogynistic pussy jokes. The action sequences are ineptly staged and completely unconvincing -- the film, that I expect was expensive, looks like it was made for about $29.95. Everything is overlit and unpersuasively staged -- there's no suspense and the garish fight scenes are interrupted with inserted shots of explosions that seem to be taking place somewhere else entirely. (The rear projection in this film makes Hitchcock's intentionally jarring use of that technique seem almost realistic.) In one sequence, Bond flies an ultralite, a sort of aerial motorscooter equipped with flamethrowers and rockets. He's chased by a bunch of helicopters over a low mountain range of volcanic cinder cones. (If I remember correctly, the bad guy's lair is hidden under a lake in one of these craters.) The weapons on the Ultralite aircraft don't work the way they are advertised to function -- how would you use a flame-thrower in an aerial dogfight anyway? The sequence is totally unexciting since we know that Bond will simply destroy all of the helicopters in a series of inserted explosion shots. The whole thing is a mix of sadism and sex with the sadism predominating. A blonde female assassin has Bond chained to a chair in her boudoir. She goes to her bedside armoire which, of course, is filled with instruments of torture. In the drawer, there is a dermatome with which see proposes to skin our hero alive. But she first has to kiss her victim, becomes entangled in his embrace, and Bond, taking the dermatome, uses its razor-sharp edge to cut the straps of her evening gown, before unzipping the seat of her pants. One can see the why Connery wanted to escape from this crap. It's like Ed Wood without the weirdly serious overtones that make his movies interesting.
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