Marnie

Plot synopsis:
The story opens as a woman with dark hair, seen only from behind, carries a suitcase along a train platform. The yellow purse tucked under her arm is presented at such an angle that it is suggestive of female genitalia.In the next scene, outraged business owner Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel) rants to a pair of detectives that he was "cleaned out" by a female employee named Marion Holland whom he obviously hired for her looks despite her lack of professional references. A client of Strutt's, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), overhears the conversation and says that he remembers this woman, wryly referring to her as "the brunette with the legs."The woman, real name Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a compulsive thief, and has made off with almost $10,000 stashed in the yellow purse. She changes her appearance, going from brunette to blonde, and flees with the cash, journeying south to a town in Virginia where she keeps her beloved horse, Forio, stabled. She then visits her mother Bernice (Louise Latham) in Baltimore. She lavishes her mother with expensive gifts in an attempt to impress her and win her love, but the woman is cold and distant with Marnie, showing much more maternal affection towards a little neighbor girl named Jessie whom she babysits. Marnie's intense jealousy of Jessie seems inappropriate for a grown woman to express, and along with her panic over a bouquet of red gladiolas and her mother's insistence that "decent" women don't need men, the first hints of the dysfunction that drives Marnie to lie and steal appear.Time goes by and Marnie constructs a new identity, Mary Taylor, with the intent to run her scam again on another victim. She applies for a job at a printing company in Philadelphia owned by none other than Mark Rutland. Despite her now chestnut hair, he recognizes Marnie as the woman who stole from Strutt, but, excited by the thrill of chasing and capturing the attractive criminal, he hires her. Marnie robs Rutland, too, but he anticipated this outcome and manages to track Marnie down. Instead of handing her over to the police, he blackmails her into marrying him.On their honeymoon, which takes place aboard a cruise ship, Mark finds out about Marnie's frigidity. At first, he respects her wishes, but soon obsessed with controlling and dominating Marnie, he rapes her. The next morning, she tries to commit suicide by drowning herself in a pool aboard the ship, but Mark finds her in time to resuscitate her.In addition to Marnie's aversion to sex and generally troubled behavior, Mark's marriage faces a challenge from Lil (Diane Baker), the sister of his deceased first wife who clearly had designs on him and views Marnie as a rival she can overthrow. Upon learning that Mark has bought Strutt's silence by paying off the money Marnie stole, Lil invites Strutt to a party at the house. Strutt recognizes Marnie, the former "Marion Holland" who outfoxed and humiliated him, but grudgingly keeps quiet about her crime when Rutland threatens to take his business elsewhere and convince other clients to do the same.Meanwhile Marnie takes Forio out on their first fox hunt. As the hounds descend upon the fox in a snarling pack, Marnie sees the bright red jacket of one of the hunters; the combination of the violent scene and the color triggers Marnie's own fight-or-flight response. She charges away into the woods at a mad gallop. She loses control of Forio and can't rein him in when he heads for a high stone wall. The horse breaks both of his front legs against the wall and crashes to the other side in agony. Marnie is forced to shoot Forio to put the animal out of his misery, an act that ruptures her already fragile state of mind. Still armed with the gun she used to kill her horse, she heads for the Rutland safe. She's driven to repeat her usual modus operandi-- steal from Mark and run away, but by putting Marnie in a position where she already owns anything she might ordinarily be tempted to steal, Mark has frustrated her compulsive desires. Marnie breaks down in a welter of neurotic conflict.Mark attempts to discover the root of Marnie's compulsions, nightmares and odd phobias: of thunderstorms, of men and of the color red. He takes Marnie to her mother's house in Baltimore where he demands an explanation of the "bad accident" Bernice suffered. He knows from reading reports of the incident that Bernice made her living as a prostitute whose main clientele were the sailors that frequented Baltimore's shipyards. Marnie relives the night when she was six years old and one of her mother's clients (Bruce Dern) approached Marnie as she cowered on the sofa, frightened by a thunderstorm. Bernice reacted to the sight of the drunken sailor caressing her daughter by attacking him frantically. Seeing her mother struggling with the man, Marnie struck him on the head with a fireplace poker, killing him. The blood spouting from his head wound to drench his white uniform led to her fear of the color red.Bernice explains that she became pregnant with Marnie as a teen after she'd been lured into having sex by the promise of her date's basketball sweater, and tells her daughter that she claimed responsibility for the sailor's death and fought to keep the authorities from placing Marnie in a foster home because Marnie's the only thing she ever really loved.Relieved of the repressed traumatic memories that poisoned her subconscious, Marnie believes that she is capable of renouncing crime and sustaining an intimate relationship. She and Mark ride back to his family estate.

Tags: melodrama, romantic, psychological, murder, flashback

Review:
This movie stars 'Tippi' Hedren, Sean Connery, Diane Baker, Louise Latham, Mariette Hartley, Martin Gabel, and Alan Napier.
Hedren plays the role of Marnie Edgar, a strange woman with psychological problems who is a professional thief and has an intense fear of men, thunderstorms, and even the color red.
Connery must play the dual role of keeping Marnie away from the police while trying to find out why she does what she does.This is indeed an excellent Hitchcock film.
The moments leading up to Marnie's revealing flashback are incredible, and the movie reeks of typical Hitchcock: slow, methodic pacing to a brilliant and stunning climax.Marnie is not a patented "Hitchcock classic": The fades-to-red have not aged well (if they ever did look good), the horse-riding scenes just don't work, and the backgrounds are obviously fake (although it has been speculated that Hitchcock did this on purpose -- whatever the case he later regretted it).
Playing Freud to her Jane, he alternates between trying to get her into bed and determining the link between her thefts and her fear of sex, thunder storms, the colour red and men.Tippi Hedren is ideally suited for the role of Marnie; her trembling-but-firm voice and impassive, doll-like face give her the look and feel of a tough-yet-vulnerable child-woman, lost in a nightmare world.
Hedren and Connery's singular coupling on screen and their performances have also been subject to much heated debate - in my opinion they're both excellent, in that they very successfully portray genuinely unlovable characters and play off one another almost instinctively and to great effect, helped by a phenomenally sarcastic dialogue and more than memorable quips ("The idea was to kill myself, not to feed the damned fish", as well as the entire "You Freud, me Jane" sequence).
Delightful.Hedren is adequately surly, bitter, spiteful, troubled and fragile all at the same time, her average acting talents and icy beauty working for the film rather than against it, whereas Connery is nothing short of a perverse yet suave male filthy pig dying to get in between her treasured legs and "take legal possession" for precisely those reasons.
It's interesting that Hitchcock had troubles with his leading ladies in some of his best films - his disdain of Kim Novak and endless arguments he had with her on set are all well documented, in addition to his falling out with Hedren halfway through "Marnie".
In any case, it's perfect casting for both leads in this one, in addition to a brilliant support led by Latham and Baker, not to mention Herrmann's emotional score, which so assuredly bounces between hysterical, pleading, lustful, torturous, and tragic - and back again.Aside from directorial touches of genius (who doesn't get goosebumps when Marnie first reveals her face after washing out the hair dye) - there are undoubtedly many, many flaws and technically weak places in the film - the zooming in and out on the money in the Rutland safe is a particular standout in that respect, totally over the top and downright silly.
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.
Like "Notorious," the marriage is one of convenience, or so it appearsthe end of the film is open-ended.For those who are not aware of it, Hitchcock fired the initial scriptwriter (a male), who honestly felt the rape of the wife by the husband was out character with male lead played by Sean Connery.
As Mark tries to help her to confront and resolve troubles .This unsung and really criticized movie at the time of its release contains thrills , tension , suspense , psychoanalysis , romance, unlimited excitement and plenty of plot twists , as usual in Hitchock films .
They liked his charismatic performance so much that they decided to offer him the role even though the obviously Scottish actor did not really fit with their conception of Mark as an "American aristocrat." Tippi Hedren is pretty well as confuse amnesic thief who robs her employers and then changes her identity .
But unlike his earlier films, like NOTORIOUS or even REBECCA, the gleam of old Hollywood glamor was a thing of the past when MARNIE was made and released, and what degrading things the director got away with during the golden age of Hollywood, by blinding the audience of the seedy aspects of his stories with big stars and big budgets and big studios, he simply couldn't get away with that anymore with a minor actress like Tippi Hedren and up and coming star Sean Connery playing the male "romantic" lead.
Even if he created two modern masterpieces of horror just before this film, with PSYCHO and THE BIRDS, Hitchcock's style and themes didn't transition well with the changes of the 1960s and MARNIE was the first of a series of misfires Hitch made in that era.
But as I said before, Hitchcock was losing touch with how to represent a story with modern themes and as it is now, with MARNIE looking like some sort of glamorous romantic flick (imagine PILLOW TALK but with a sordid twist), well it just doesn't work at all; it doesn't work as a romantic movie, or "sexual suspense" or as a psychological thriller.
Although Tippi Hedren as the title character in Marnie is a compulsive thief and sexually frigid, you have to ask yourself what's wrong with Sean Connery taking up with this dame.
Especially since he has an attractive widowed sister-in-law in Diane Baker so obviously interested in him.Like Spellbound and Vertigo, Marnie deals with psychological problems of the main character.
Mark realises that the only way to save his marriage, and possibly Marnie's life, is to unlock the dark secret buried in her past which is the cause of her psychological problems.When the film was released in 1964 it was not a success at the box-office.
(Kelly wanted to use "Marnie" as the vehicle for her return to the big screen following her marriage, until she discovered that her husband's subjects did not wish to see their Princess impersonating a mentally disturbed kleptomaniac).This was the second of the two films Hedren made with Hitchcock, and she is excellent, better than in "The Birds".
Critically-drubbed suspense-melodrama from Alfred Hitchcock has eternally-lackluster Tippi Hedren playing the mysterious, troubled Marnie, a frigid kleptomaniac (!) whose modus operandi is to disguise herself, change her name and rip off a series of trusting employers; her latest boss, a peculiarly cast Sean Connery, takes a liking to her and hopes to cure Marnie of her ills.
The audience I watched it with had lost of laughs for scenes that I don't think were intended to be funny, such as Sean Connery's suave seductions on the honeymoon boat, or the part when he peruses a book entitled (I kid you not) "Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female."  The flashes of red color did nothing for me, nor did the explanation at the end leave me with a fully satisfied explanation for why exactly Marnie had so cooly stolen so much money.
Tippi Hedren gives it her all, and fares decently considering that she had to direct herself for most of the movie (apparently she and Hitchcock were not on speaking terms at the time), although she was better in "The Birds."  Bernard Herrman's score is lush and beautiful, but the script is just downright crummy, in both plot and dialogue.
First of all, the title of the movie "Marnie" represents the name of the female lead (Tippi Hedren), who happens to have serious psychological problems, which cause her to steal and lie...plenty.
I'm guessing that the dark, complex psychology that permeates the film was most probably one of the reasons it didn't resonate as strongly at the box office as anticipated.Tippi Hedren returns to the ice blonde leading lady role again after her debut in Hitchcock's previous hit The Birds.
Directed by one of the greatest of all directors, Alfred Hitchcock, and starring two very able actors in Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, yet has a bizarre feel to it that polarized me and essentially turned me off from caring about any of these people.
As the story goes, a very complex and troubled woman named Marnie (Hedren) gets involved with her boss Mark Rutland (Connery) after he discovers her trying to steal from him.
The psychology is simplistic, and every bit of "help" Mark (Sean Connery) offers Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is forced on her, often brutally.
It's as if Hitchcock felt that he had gone as far as he could with the horror and science-fiction of his previous two movies, and decided to opt instead for psychological realism/suspenseWhat struck me watching the film again after so many years is how good Tippi Hedren's performance is.
Unsurprisingly, Marnie is a much darker film than Hitchcock's typically hyperbolic boilerplate might suggest; recalling elements of the emotional torture and sense of personal catharsis central to his grand masterpiece Vertigo (1958) and positively filled to the brim with cold characters, theft, psychological despair, childhood trauma, attempted suicide, murder and implicit rape.
It's all dressed up in the glossy, impeccably directed and completely artificial world that only Hitchcock could really create, and is further embellished with the director's usual arcane sense of humour and grand-standing moments of audience manipulation.However, even with these incredibly fascinating themes and Hitchcock's bold, directorial touches, Marnie remains something of a love it or hate it film for many fans of the director, with some criticising the dated employment of studio production techniques in the context of the more exciting, free-spirited films coming out of Europe and Japan during the early to mid 1960's, and the similar thematic elements recycled from his earlier works; chiefly To Catch a Thief (1955) and of course, the aforementioned Vertigo.
So, the general consensus from dissenting Hitchcock devotees is that Marnie finds Hitchcock attempting to recapture his 50's peak, but inadvertently producing an inferior knock-off, right down to the casting of lead actors Tippy Hedren and Sean Connery, who here - it could be argued - seem like two-dimensional stand-ins for the (then) more iconic Grace Kelly and Carry Grant.
However, for me, Marnie works in spite of such limitations; with the elements that many consider to be flaws actually pushing the narrative into darker, more interesting areas pertaining to the carefully constructed world that these two troubled and enigmatic characters have seemingly manufactured.Like Vertigo, you could argue there's a definite element of dream-logic being subtly woven into the story here, with the deliberately abstracted and artificial world created by Hitchcock lending an air of almost expressionist mystery; as dark secrets, urges and impulses spiral out of control amidst the more frothy moments of Hitchcock wit, melodrama and suspense.
Sure, it's probably not as enjoyable or invigorating as many of his more purely entertainment based films, such as Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954) or The Birds (1963), but it works for me and has a number of scenes that still stand out in my mind as some of the most interesting and compelling sequences that Hitchcock ever directed.The plot for one thing is fascinating and deals with many of Hitchcock's favourite themes of mystery and intrigue, with fraud, deception, a crisis of identity, lies and childhood disturbance all being spun amidst some of Hitchcock's boldest and most interesting examples of cinematic experimentation.
In fact, the final reveal of the root of Marnie's emotional problems is film-making at its absolute best, as Hitchcock makes his expressionist influences clear with a subtly distorted set that makes full use of a forced perspective and a dizzying contra-zoom used to pull the audience literally into the scene (and underpinning the character's resistance to revisit it) as well as capturing the natural sense of cold disorientation, as emotions and secrets spill out uncontrollable.For me, the entire final twenty-minutes of this film were incredibly powerful; not only in the way that Hitchcock directed the sequences or how they accumulate to create a tight and cohesive whole, but in the searing combination of character and performance and the overwhelming sense of sadness and empathetic understanding that they are able to convey.
There's also fine support from the adorable Diane Baker and an effective cameo from Bruce Dern, who would later appear in Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976); whilst the subtle and psychological relationship between Marnie and the character played by Connery is one of the most interesting of any Hitchcock film and one that definitely requires some careful consideration..
Marnie's floundering story, overacting and, at times, surprisingly weak production left me bewildered and wondering why it has apparently been redeemed here on IMDb.To clear things up a bit, I admit that I have not seen every Hitchcock film and nor do I plan to see them all.
Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery both have a chance to play enormously complicated characters in 'Marnie'.
The only outstanding part really is the ending; you get to admire three great actors -- Tippi Hedren, Sean Connery and Louise Latham -- pulling it off: a wildly improbable tale, a very far-fetched resolution of the movie's psychological mystery plot; and for a change, the final scenes are masterfully shot by Hitchcock.
Also, despite the weakness of material at hand, and unsatisfactory direction, both Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery showcase their acting skills throughout, so even if the movie as such is a bore, you at least get the "technical" pleasure of watching this highly accomplished pair of actors trying to make something out of it..
Disturbing Hitchcock film with Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren.
Marnie begins and ends with the word "robbed" which expresses the central theme of the movie as Hedren has been robbed of her childhood by circumstances revealed in the film.Tippi Hedren, who was criticized at the time as a lightweight actress, does an excellent job in a very demanding role.Sean Connery is also good although nowadays it is weird to see him in this film because he looks exactly like he does as James Bond, even dressing alike in some scenes.
Marnie's a great example of Alfred Hitchcock's genius: it fails to live up to the standards set by Vertigo, Rear Window, Notorious and so on, yet it's by a mile better than most of the movies in almost any other director's catalog.The story of a troubled woman searching for balance by stealing is dynamic and thrilling, and at times Hitchcock manages to handle the subject matter with his golden touch of captivating mystery.
What's The Matter With Marnie could have been the full title of the picture.She (Tippi Hedren, probably at her best) is frigid around her sort of blackmailer of a husband (Connery), who makes her marry him or else turn her over to the police after catching her heisting the safe at Rutland's.
Tippi Hedren wouldn't even believe a woman could refuse to have sex with a hunk like Sean Connery, "it's called acting" answered Hitchcock.
His eyes during the 'rape' scene don't suggest bestiality but possessiveness, a sort of obsession to respond to Marnie's own obsession; but that might ultimate cure her.The first writer regretted that the psychoanalyst from the book was removed by Hitchcock, who wanted to have two characters to carry the film as if he didn't believe Hedren would be enough, and actually, he's right because the mix of Marnie's pathos and Mark's hubris drive the story and Connery plays his part with a burning intensity that equals Cary Grant in "Notorious" and "Suspicion", and Laurence Olivier in "Rebecca".
Alfred Hitchcock directed this drama that stars Tippi Hedren as Marnie Edgar, a beautiful but troubled woman who is also a habitual liar and thief, robbing her first employer of several thousand dollars before moving on to her current one, the Rutland Firm, run by Mark Rutland(played by Sean Connery).
If Sean Connery could create are more menacing character, we could root for Marnie much more.But that's not what Alfred Hitchcock is going for.
Marnie (1964)Plot In A Paragraph: Mark Rutland (Connery) blackmails Marnie (Tippi Hedren) a thief he has caught in to marrying him and discovers she has serious psychological problems, and tries to help her confront and resolve them.I think this movie and his performance are under rated!!
Once again Connery took second billing to a woman, this time Hedren played the title character (in her second and final Hitchcock movie) and she does a good job in a challenging role.Some of it is dated awfully, and some of the supporting cast is not up to standard either, but what Marnie gets right, I think is very good.