Upon release, Alfred Hitchcock’s follow-up to The Birds disappointed our critic, who lamented “floundering” performances and “technical roughness”.
By Penelope Houston Sight & Sound
Marnie is the part with which Hitchcock hoped to tempt Grace Kelly back to the screen; and one can see what she might have made of the ice cold, perfect secretary exterior, masking the torments of the damned. In the event, Hitchcock cast his “discovery” of The Birds, ‘Tippi’ Hedren; and there is something almost brutal in the way he ruthlessly drives his inexperienced leading lady at the hurdles of this far from easy part.
The film opens quite brilliantly: close-up of a big yellow bag held under a girl’s arm; a pull back by the camera to show us the back view of a brunette, with bag and luggage, walking down a long station platform; a brief flash to the office, sardonically to establish the circumstances of the theft; then the girl’s arrival at an hotel (with corridor glimpse of Hitchcock), the quick transfer of objects from one case to another, the spilling of cash out of the yellow bag, and then the hair dye dissolving in water, and the emergence from the wash-basin of a blonde ‘Tippi’ Hedren. This is fast, intriguing, involving: a superbly economical and confident introduction.
After it, everything moves along smoothly, with that careful blocking in of groundwork which marks most of Hitchcock’s recent films: the visit to the mother culminates in a dire and sinister image, of her clumping downstairs in the dark with her stick; the office routine is amusingly laid out, leading up to the mechanics of the theft. Even if there are over-emphatic touches (the screen suffused with red whenever Marnie has one of her turns), everything seems set fair.
From the marriage on, however, things get out of hand, with both leading players floundering badly as Hitchcock piles up his demands on them. Diane Baker does nicely as the malicious Lil, and there are the odd Hitchcock flourishes to be enjoyed along the way, but fundamentally the trouble seems to be that the film falls between the two stools of straight suspense melodrama (what is Marnie’s secret?) and the full-dress character study that would only have been possible with a more experienced actress.
By the last half-hour, the melodramatic whips are out and everyone seems under pressure. In her husband’s office, Marnie’s hand reaches out for the money in the safe, can’t touch it, and Hitchcock zooms crudely in and out on shots of the piled up dollar bills. Arrival on mother’s slum doorstep in a pelting thunderstorm; heroine cowering against the wall, speaking in a little girl voice; then into the flashback, with mother (aged for these scenes, by the film’s chronology, about 21) looking like some raddled Blanche Du Bois. The end gives us, sure enough, that old transference of guilt theme so beloved of Hitchcock’s Cahiers admirers; but in the circumstances it seems hardly enough. There are some surprising technical roughness in the film (obvious moments of back projection; Forio’s fatal crash); and also some surprises in the view of the American landed gentry, calling each other “old boy” and “old girl”, fussing over their tea and riding to hounds.
Tippi Hedren’s Silence
October 20, 2012Richard Brody, New Yorker
Even as John F. Kennedy’s esteem as a statesman increases, so, too, does the recognition of his private sexual misconduct in office, including his affair with a teen-age White House intern, Mimi Beardsley, who didn’t make the matter public at the time or soon thereafter, but recently wrote a book about it, under her married name, Mimi Alford. At exactly the same time—in 1962 and 1963—Tippi Hedren was subjected to aggressive sexual advances from her employer, Alfred Hitchcock (as depicted in the HBO movie “The Girl,” which premièred on Saturday), who, in response to her rejection, acted vengefully toward her on the set and then, when she was unwilling to work with him again (despite being under contract to him), refused to let her work for other directors. Hedren, too, waited decades before making her story public.
This summer, in the run-up to the broadcast of “The Girl,” Hedren spoke at a Television Critics Association event, where (as reported by Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress), she said:
I had not talked about this issue with Alfred Hitchcock to anyone. Because all those years ago, it was still the studio kind of situation. Studios were the power. And I was at the end of that, and there was absolutely nothing I could do legally whatsoever. There were no laws about this kind of a situation. If this had happened today, I would be a very rich woman.
Alford could have said the same thing; the difference is that the connection between Kennedy’s policies and his intimate conduct is unclear, whereas the two films that Hedren made with Hitchcock, “The Birds” and “Marnie,” display their troubled relationship, which adds much to the emotional power of those movies. “Marnie,” in particular, is one of the greatest of all films, not least for its embodiment of Hitchcock’s frustrated obsession and Hedren’s frozen anguish. Yet, reconsidering it in the light of Hedren’s revelations and their dramatization in “The Girl,” the movie’s greatness—and its personal significance for Hitchcock—become all the more apparent.
The key plot point of “Marnie” is the need to keep a dark secret out of the eyes of the public and the purview of the law. The title character, played by Hedren, is a kleptomaniac who relies on her beauty to get jobs that allow her to embezzle money from her employers. Sean Connery plays Mark Rutland, a publishing executive whose accounting firm she victimized. When, by chance, she applies for work with Rutland, he hires her, falls in love with her, catches her stealing from him, compels her to marry him, and—discovering that her many phobias also include an aversion to sex—seeks to cure her by means of his own version of wild psychoanalysis. But, from the start, his entire plot depends on keeping his accountant from pressing charges against her.
Of course, theoretically, if Marnie were arrested and her case was heard in open court, her mental illness could still have been recognized and she could have been treated—by way of the impersonal techniques of medical and psychological science, not by way of Rutland’s love. The subject of “Marnie” is the necessity, for the satisfaction of desire, to keep private affairs out of the public and legal domains—to prevent the intrusion of therapeutic rationality into the intimate realm. That threatened impingement is what gives Hitchcock’s film the feel of a world out of joint, and what bends its tone toward that of Antonioni’s films, in which the very life of the individual seems emptied out by abstract social forces.
Hitchcock didn’t just film a man’s obsession with a woman who is unresponsive to his desire; he also filmed a man who needed to keep misdeeds (admittedly hers, not his own) secret in order to have any chance of fulfilling his desires. Enduring an obsession that could be cured only by means of Hedren’s love or its simulacrum, compliance—and having done things with Hedren that he’d never want revealed—he made a film about the danger of the mirror being shattered, of the opaque barrier of the screen collapsing. It’s the drama of a painfully self-conscious fear of exposure. In 1973, (in an interview with Tom Snyder), Hitchcock said, “I’m scared stiff of anything that’s to do with the law” (“I never drive a car, on the theory that if you don’t drive a car, you can’t get a ticket,” he added). He made that fear most explicit in his 1956 film “The Wrong Man,” but turned it into a frenzied masterwork of mental dislocation in “Marnie.”
