Marnie
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Movie Reviews of Marnie
Movie Review: Even in a trauma we remain free
Summary: 4 Stars
This film is extremely powerful because it centers on a woman who obviously has a problem, not an accident but a problem. We know very fast she is having many identities and that her main objective in the jobs she gets with her charm more than her references is to steal the cash from the firm's safe and leave. We understand she is taking care of a mother of hers with that money more than of herself. One man, one of his employers, officially the fifth one, will though go through the surface and discover who she really is, but he falls in love with her and, being a sort of anthropologist (zoologist is the word he uses, isn't it?) and psychologist, he is fascinated by her criminal personality and her fears and he decides to get her out of both. He has to bring her back to the trauma she lived when a small child and confront her with her own mother and the truth. And she is finally liberated from the fear caused by the absence of conscious memory of her crime at the time. I won't say more on the details. I am interested in the way Hitchcock builds his own case little by little and brings us to the point when the trauma can be relived and revealed. Yet I find his social psychology a little bit simple altogether. He only centers on the negative elements. He should have shown how ambiguous the girl must have been at the time with the two adults she was confronted to and with herself and her own act that made her accept her mother telling a lie to save her, because a child who has committed a crime understands very well when the adult covers his or her mistake and then the feelings are always ambiguous and it is that ambiguity that makes the child forget about the incident that becomes a trauma. The liberation is also absolutely too mechanical to be real. Yes there often is an illumination that is sudden but then the transformation of the traumatized individual is long because the trauma left a lot of traces, blocking elements or just gremlins in the head of the traumatized one. But Hitchcock does it very well. In 1964 he could only be inspired by Freud of whom he proposes a simplified reading, but today he would appear as a disciple of Ron L. Hubbard because dianetics is just what this film is, a mechanical and simplified version of psychoanalysis. That's another Hitchcock film from the 60s that has suffered some with the passing of time.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Crime and Punishment...plus Sex...
Summary: 4 Stars
Marni (Tippi Hedren) does the crime (grand theft), but wants nothing to do with marriage and/or sex. She is however, blackmailed into both by Mark (Sean Connery), a wealthy publisher, who discovers Marni's errants ways. Smitten, but puzzled by the extreme frigidity of the icy thief, he assumes, as naturally any man would, that the problem lies with his wife, not him. Well, in this case, he's right! Come on, folks! 'Tis the smoldering Sean Connery we are dealing with! And yet, Marni approaches the prospect of their wedding night with slightly less cheer then a year-long Gulag sentence might have inspired... The twisted events that follow lead to the neat solution of this psychological puzzle, but even then they do not guarantee a happy ending for the newly married.
Though the batteries supplying this odd couple with their on-screen electricity have yet to run out, the naive treatment of psychological disorders dates the 45 year old film significantly. However, once you allow yourself to overlook this shortcoming, you are rewarded with Hedren's supperb acting performance. It is a great shame that following her refusal to continue working for Hitchhock exclusively, ever possessive of his leading ladies, Hitchhock spitefully and succesfully blocked Hedren from the type of movie career this talented actress so deserved. The film is further noteworthy to any movie buff as the accepted start of decline in the quality of Hitchhock's work (still, it was judged more harshly by the director's contemporaries, then it is today).
And yet, as faulty as the technical crafstmanship of the film may have been, I was mesmerized by the on-screen chemistry between Connery and Hedren. I have re-watched "Marnie" numerous times with enjoyment and consider the DVD a worthy purchase...
Movie Review: A Magnificent Failure
Summary: 4 Stars
Marnie as not as well executed as any of Hitchock's classics. It's also not as well-done as some of the lighter fare (The Trouble With Harry, To Catch a Thief). But that doesn't necessarily make it a bad movie. It's a movie that's interesting despite it's flaws, and if you're a big fan of Hitchcock you might find yourself wondering if it would be ranked as a masterpiece had the cast been changed.
In the movie Tippi Hedren plays a woman who's made a career out of hustling big companies. After pulling a big job, she comes to work for a company in Philadelphia that's run by Sean Connery. He knows she's up to no good, but he allows her to pull off her heist. In the end, rather than turning her over to the police he chooses to keep her close to him and try to figure her out out by playing amateur psychologist.
The plot might seem a bit far-fetched, but it's not more outlandish than Vertigo. At times the dialog is bad. But the real problem is the acting, most notably by Tippi Hedren, a former model who was at least adequate in The Birds. She's completely overmatched in this role and you have to wonder what it would have been like with a better actress, say, Grace Kelly.
Still, even with the acting the movie is more than watchable. It's even enjoyable. There is still a great deal of suspense and a good twist at the end. It's really a bold film. Perhaps it didn't measure up to the high standards Hitchcock set with his other films, but it's still far better than average.
Movie Review: A memorable mystery drama for the way in which Hitchcock squeezed and twisted suspense out of the simplest materials...,
Summary: 4 Stars
The childhood roots of Marnie's problem were certainly the fulcrum of the plot; but they were also a vital strand in her character, the main force of her motivation...
Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a psychologically scarred gray-suited serial thief who would take a job in an office, win liking and trust by her good looks, manners and work; then steal the safe and move to another part of the country, changing her look, her name, and her identity...
This what she does when she went to work for Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a wealthy sadist businessman; but he replaced the stolen money, tracked her down, and blackmailed her with two alternatives: to go to jail or to marry him...
Only, besides Marnie's traumas and aftermaths, she was cool, desperately detached, and couldn't find in herself any affection for any living thing except fondness for horses... Sexually, she was extremely cold, and her marriage was not consummated... And she was continually afraid of thunderstorms and couldn't handle the red color...
I don't want to spoil some of other brilliant little touches, but Marnie had always said she was an orphan, and Mark tracked down her icy mother (Louise Latham), and brought the two face to face... There was a beautifully acted scene here when the two met up again and Bernice who even now could show no more affection to her daughter than Marnie could to her husband...
Movie Review: Excellent
Summary: 4 Stars
Hitchcock got a bad rap for Marnie. For some aspects of this film deservedly so. The sets are painfully fake--talk about old Hollywood, and Marnie's ending is mellowdramatic to a fault, almost comically so. Digging up repressed memories and having catharsis is old as the hills, and any therapist or person in therapy will tell you the quickness with which it happens here is ridiculous, even by 1964 standards.
Yet Marinie is artictically redeemed in many ways. The opening titles are done over Bernard Herman's jarring string music. Suddenly, the music stops, and Hitchcock cuts to a close up of Marnie's yellow pocketbook, then goes wide for a long shot of the railroad station she walks in. Hitchcock employs red color filters through the movie: you can tell from these moves he was expermenting, succssfully, with techniques young Europian modernists like Godard were then using. These add suprise to the film, and if the storytelling needs work, the adventurousness of Hitchcock here makes the film worth several viewings.
After the 1-2 horror punch of Psycho and The Byrds, the psychosexual bent of Marnie asks the viewer to make an incredable adjustment, particualarly when the execution is so soap operaesqe and painfully dated. Yet taken for what it is Marnie is visually stunning and the storyline is compelling enough to make you want to watch.