In my copy of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller appendix, there is an undated rating of 2/10 in the margins for Marnie. I have only the faintest recollection of catching Marnie on TCM when I was a teenager, and the way that Brode writes about the film in his negative blurb is provocative, so I must admit that at some point in the past, I saw this (in whole or in part), was bored and/or offended by it, and graded it poorly. On rewatch as an adult, although there are moments where Marnie fails, it’s also much more interesting and well-considered than I (half-)remembered.
Marnie opens on a dark-haired woman whom we only see from behind as she makes her way down a train station’s departure line. Elsewhere, business owner Mr. Strutt (Martin Gabel) opens his safe and realizes that “Marion Holland,” the pretty brunette with nice legs whom he hired despite her lack of references, has made off with nearly $10K in cash (about $108K in 2026). He complains about this to publishing magnate Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), for whom he handles accounting, and reminds Mark that he met “Marion” at an office party. The dark-haired woman from the opening washes the dye out of her hair and inspects her newly blonde look in the mirror; this is Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a compulsive kleptomaniac and pathological liar. She returns to Baltimore to visit her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), in the latter’s skid row home, where Marnie expresses great envy over her mother’s attention to a neighborhood girl named Jessie, whom the older woman treats with affection that she never showed to Marnie. On to her next con job, Marnie applies to the Rutland publishing house under the name “Mary Taylor,” where Mark instantly recognizes her, but he directs the manager to hire her anyway. Once she’s under his employ, Mark courts “Mary” despite the antagonistic relationship between her and Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker), the widow of Mark’s deceased brother who is also in love with Mark, while he patiently waits for the day when Marnie will steal from him so that he can blackmail her into marrying him.
There’s one big misstep in Marnie, and it’s the fact that Mark sexually assaults the title character on their honeymoon cruise. This is apparently something that happened in the novel on which the film was based, and screenwriter Evan Hunter (best known to most by his pen name Ed McBain), who had previously written The Birds, objected so strongly to transliterating that into his script that he was ultimately let go from the project. Stating that all sympathy for Mark would be lost afterward, he insisted upon omitting the sequence and was replaced for his trouble by Jay Presson Allen, who received full screenwriting credit despite Hunter’s work, making this the only Hitchcock film to be credited to a woman screenwriter. Allen would later go on to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay twice, with one of those nominations coming for her penning of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and she also penned Deathtrap and did an uncredited rewrite on Copycat. She had no problem adhering to Hitchcock’s vision, up to and including the rape scene, although it is possible that we owe her a debt of gratitude for handling it with subtlety and grace, as it occurs entirely offscreen and only in implication. Still, when people talk about Alfred Hitchcock as a man who “hated” and “terrorized” women, this is probably the movie that codified that idea best.
Brandon outlined it best when writing up the “Bonus Features” guide to Notorious when it was our Movie of the Month; starting out strong with Norma Bates in Psycho in 1960 and following that up with Jessica Tandy’s frigid mother of the love interest in The Birds, the 1960s were the decade where Hitchcock let his mother-hating flag fly. Although Bernice Edgar isn’t the main antagonist in Marnie (that would be either Lil or Mark, depending on how you look at it), she is the film’s primary villain, as it becomes clear that Marnie’s frigidity and intermittent outbursts stem from something that happened in her childhood. Although the film seems to be headed toward a conclusion where we learn that former sex worker Bernice also, um, “offered” Marnie to her clients, this is, thankfully, not the case. Ultimately, the root of Marnie’s psychological issues is more mundane, if no less violent. Instead of doing a single thing to address her daughter’s mental health when the girl blocks out the memory of the inciting event, Bernice justified said temporary amnesia as a gift from God, even though her own memory of the event makes her shrink at her own daughter’s touch, all while doting on neighborhood children. She even seems pleased to stoke her daughter’s resentment and jealousy, instead brushing neighbor girl Jessie’s hair while explicitly stating that she never did the same for Marnie. No wonder Marnie ended up the way that she did.
The opening half-hour promises a different kind of movie, centering on a master lady thief, that I would have liked to see Hitchcock try at some point in his career. What we end up with is an exploration of the dark side of sexuality through the lens of contemporary psychology. A year before this film was released, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act, and mere months after the film’s premier, an article was published in the September/October issue of Fact magazine that inspired the American Medical Association to establish the Goldwater Rule as part of the group’s medical ethics guidelines. Psychology was a pop phenomenon, and it’s no surprise that Hitchcock would want to capitalize on that, given that he was fascinated with the subject long before it was in vogue. Mark’s layman’s attempts to get to the root of Marnie’s issues are as effective as they are blunt, leading her to quip “You Freud, me Jane” at one point, and it’s not a flattering portrait of him. Hitchcock was probably wagering that Connery’s sex appeal would make it easier to stomach Mark’s most evil action, which it may have at the time, but given that Connery would later remorselessly admit to slapping women around, it’s a bit more difficult to stomach in a different way. It’s also implied that Marnie recognizes that Mark is truly trying to help her and is willing to let him, as she attempts to commit suicide the following morning by drowning herself in the ship’s pool rather than throwing herself overboard. Although she quips that “the idea was to kill [her]self, not feed the fishes,” it also reads as a statement that she wants to be saved. Ultimately, that makes Marnie a movie about something truly dark and twisted, and although it isn’t the con artist girlboss movie that it tricks you into thinking it will be, it’s still much more worthwhile than the film’s grimy sexpolitick would lead you to expect.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
