Marnie was one of Alfred Hitchcock'a lesser films, both in terms of popularity and quality. It's not a bad film, but there's nothing that really liftes it out of the ordinary.
In fact, until I did a link in this post for it, I had trouble recalling it's narrative:
While the film flopped at the box office, latter day critics have tried to overcompensate for this fact by declaring the film a masterpiece. It’s not, but it is a good, solid film that is better than originally thought. Its first hour is a nearly flawless study of a female thief, Marnie Edgar (Hedren)- aka Margaret Edgar, Peggy Nicholson, and Mary Taylor, who is sort of what the Janet Leigh character in Psycho may have become had she not been killed so early in that film. Her development is evenly paced and believable, never forced nor rushed. Then, when Marnie is caught by her boss, a widower named Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), and blackmailed into marriage, the film goes downhill, as Marnie’s freakouts over the color red, highlighted by Hitchcock’s over the top usage of red fade-ins and interludes (compare them with Ingmar Bergman’s similar later technique in Cries And Whispers), lead to even greater and sillier melodrama.
This is what really kills the film, penned by Jay Presson Allen, from the novel by Winston Graham. The screenplay and its length- 131 minutes, are just too much, for while one can accept the outmoded technical devices Hitchcock reveled in- such as matte paintings and background screens for rear projections, the gobbledygook stew of guilt and possible sexual abuse is too much, especially given all that has come to light in the intervening decades. By film’s end we learn that Marnie is scarred not only by possible sexual abuse by one of he prostitute mother’s johns, a sailor (Bruce Dern), but also with the fact that she bashed in the man’s skull as he was fighting with her mother- one of the many filmic adaptations and twists of the then recent real life melodrama of Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato. The sight of all the blood from the dead man’s skull traumatized young Marnie. Her mother, Bernice Edgar (Louise Latham), whose back was permanently injured in the tussle, took the blame for the killing, and Marnie blocked the whole thing out. Ok, so far, a believable premise. Also that Marnie is a frigid manhater is believable, even if the man is a hunky young Sean Connery. But, how the sexual abuse or murder twisted her into a pathological liar, thief (suffering from kleptomania?), and safecracker is simply fantasy, even if all her victims are men.
But, one can go with that- with a suspension of disbelief, if the rest of the tale played out better and more realistically. We see Mark wants to help his love, but why does he even love her? He has his own sister-in-law, Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker), hot for him, and she is not nearly as laden with psychological baggage as Marnie is, even if she does vindictively set Marnie up for a confrontation with a man, Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel), whom Mark realized was Marnie’s former employer she stole from, and has to dissuade from prosecuting her. Yet, Mark is as obsessed with her as she is with stealing from men. Then, two thirds of the way through the film, he hires a private eye- never seen onscreen, and easily reveals all the pieces at the end, when he confronts Marnie and her mother, and Marnie breaks down blubbering in an overwrought baby voice. That flush of a toilet you just heard was the screenplay.
Having said that, it's one of those films whose best purpose is likely to serve as a guide to better fare by the director.
