Marnie

Tuesday, April 16, 2008

We have about a bajillion Hitchcock movies laying around my house, so I'm surprised it's taken me this long to realize that my K2K is a great excuse to catch up with the ones I haven't seen. Although frankly, it's a little shocking that I hadn't seen Marnie. It's a Hitchcock movie starring Sean Connery. For me, that's like the promise of receiving a blow job while eating mint chocolate chip ice cream. Each is great on its own, so why pass up the opportunity to do both at once? Yet, we've had this movie for years and I'd never gotten around to watching the whole thing.

This is not a typical Hitchcock film. There are his usual elements of thriller and mystery, but they take a back seat to a character piece/psychological drama with a strong Freudian bent and a little dark humor thrown in. It's not one of his classics I don't think, but it was still pretty good and in a lot of ways unique for him. There are numerous Hitchcockian elements, especially in the visual style, but the tone of the film feels different from anything else of his I've seen.

I think what I like most about Marnie is the audacity of it's bizarre plot. Tippi Hedren is Marnie, a con-woman/thief with several fake identities who is, for unknown reasons, deeply terrified of thunderstorms and of the color red. How she managed to function in society with a debilitating fear of red, I do not understand. She is caught by Sean Connery's character, and instead of turning her into the police, he tells her he loves her, blackmails Marnie into marrying him and sets about trying to cure her of her phobias and her propensity for crime.

Go back and read that again, because while the movie plays it all with a straight face, that is one fucking ludicrous plot, with a lot of weird dark undercurrents... not least of all the rape subtext. And it's no accident; Marnie is afraid of physical intimacy, and Hitchcock several times equates Connery's actions with rape. And it's also pointed out that although Connery's feelings for her are genuine, he also is something of an entomologist and may be studying her like an animal. There's a tension between his good looks, charm and desire to do right, and his darker, perhaps subconscious motivations that I think isn't uncommon to Hitchcock films. 20 years earlier, and this role would have gone to Cary Grant.

There's a lot of strange scenes and subplots as well. I think my favorite is when Marnie freaks out while horseback (one of the riders has a red jacket on) and she rides off and starts hopping fences, but one fence is too high and the horse crashes and breaks its legs. So Marnie forces her way into the house and demands a gun to shoot her horse. Man, this shit is intense.

So there's a lot of weird subtext to chew on, and two bizarre but fascinating leads. Hedren and Connery are both really quite good in this, although Hedren occasionally goes into over the top hysterics. Can't really blame her though, it's more the way the character is written.

Anyway, leave it to Hitchcock to take what could have been a low key romantic drama and turn it into some weird, intense psychological nightmare... but in a fun way! I couldn't watch this one all the time, but it's worth seeing.