Marnie (film)

Marnie
Original film poster
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited)
Screenplay by	Jay Presson Allen
Based on	Marnie  by Winston Graham
Starring	Tippi Hedren Sean Connery Diane Baker Martin Gabel Louise Latham
Music by	Bernard Herrmann
Cinematography	Robert Burks
Editing by	George Tomasini
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	July 22, 1964 (1964-07-22)
Running time	130 minutes
Language	English
Budget	$3 million
Box office	$7 million

Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the novel of the same name by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.

Evan Hunter produced initial drafts of the screenplay, but was replaced by Jay Presson Allen after creative differences. The original film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann.

Plot

Margaret "Marnie" Edgar (Hedren) is a troubled young woman who has an unnatural fear and mistrust of men, thunderstorms, and the color red. She is also a thief. She uses her charms on Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel) to get a job without references. Then late one night, she steals the contents of the company safe and disappears.

Mark and Marnie on their honeymoon cruise

Mark Rutland (Connery), a widower who owns a large publishing company, is a customer of Strutt's. He learns about the theft from the victim, and remembers the woman.

Unaware of this, Marnie applies for a job at Mark's company; he hires her and they begin to date. He too is robbed, but he tracks her down. He has fallen in love with her, and instead of handing her over to the police, blackmails her into marrying him.

They leave on a honeymoon cruise. He finds out about her frigidity. At first, he respects her wishes, but later rapes her. The next morning, she attempts suicide by drowning in the ship's swimming pool, but Mark rescues her in time.

Upon their return, Mark tries to discover the reason behind Marnie's behavior. In the end, they visit her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham) in Baltimore, Maryland, and learn that she used to be a prostitute. When Marnie was six years old, one of Bernice's clients (a sailor played by Bruce Dern) had tried drunkenly to calm the child when she was frightened by a thunderstorm, petting her and kissing her. It seemed to Bernice that the sailor was molesting Marnie, so she attacked him. During the struggle the sailor fell on Bernice and broke her leg. Seeing her mother struggling and in great pain, the child struck the sailor with a fireplace poker, killing him. The bloodshed led to her distrust of men and fear of the color red. Once the origin of her fears is revealed to her, she seems to decide that she wants to try to make her marriage work.

Cast

• Tippi Hedren as Margaret "Marnie" Edgar
• Sean Connery as Mark Rutland
• Diane Baker as Lil Mainwaring, Mark's former sister-in-law
• Louise Latham as Bernice Edgar, Marnie's mother
• Martin Gabel as Sidney Strutt, Marnie's ex-boss
• Mariette Hartley as Susan Clabon, Marnie's co-worker
• Bruce Dern as the sailor from Marnie's childhood
• Alan Napier as Mr. Rutland, Mark's father
• Bob Sweeney as Mark's Cousin Bob
• Meg Wyllie as Mrs. Turpin
• Melody Thomas Scott as Young Marnie (uncredited)

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo can be seen five minutes into the film, entering from the left of a hotel corridor after Marnie passes by.

Production

Development and writing

Alfred Hitchcock began developing the film adaptation of Winston Graham's novel Marnie in 1961. He commissioned Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Hitchcock's recently released Psycho, to work on the script. Stefano made extensive notes and wrote a 161-page treatment. However, the director's first choice to play the title role, Grace Kelly, by then Princess Grace of Monaco, withdrew from the project when the citizens of Monaco objected to her appearing in a film, especially as a sexually disturbed thief. Also, when Kelly married Prince Rainier in 1956, she had not fulfilled her contract with MGM, which could have prevented her from working for another studio. As a consequence of Kelly's departure from the film, Hitchcock put it aside to work on The Birds (1963).

After completing The Birds, Hitchcock returned to the Winston Graham adaptation. Evan Hunter, who had written the screenplay for The Birds, developed Marnie with Hitchcock, and wrote several drafts. Hunter was unhappy with the rape scene in the original novel as he felt the audience would lose sympathy for the male lead. The director, however, was enthusiastic about the scene, describing to Hunter how he intended to film it.

Hitch held up his hands the way directors do when they're framing a shot. Palms out, fingers together, thumbs extended and touching to form a perfect square. Moving his hands toward my face, like a camera coming in for a close shot, he said, "Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face".

Hunter wrote a draft containing the rape scene but also wrote an additional, substitute sequence, which he pleaded with Hitchcock to use instead. Hunter was dismissed from the project on 1 May 1963. His replacement, Jay Presson Allen, later told him that "you just got bothered by the scene that was his reason for making the movie. You just wrote your ticket back to New York." Just as Hunter had been unaware of Stefano's earlier work on Marnie, Presson Allen was not informed that she was the third writer to work on the adaptation.

Casting

The role of Marnie became a sought-after role in Hollywood. In his book Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, Tony Lee Moral revealed that a studio executive at Paramount Pictures suggested actress Lee Remick to Hitchcock for the title role. Eva Marie Saint, star of Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), and Susan Hampshire unsuccessfully pursued the role. Hitchcock also considered two other actresses who were, like Hedren, under his personal contract, Vera Miles and Claire Griswold, wife of director/actor Sydney Pollack.

Instead, Hitchcock opted to use Tippi Hedren, a one-time model he had seen in a commercial for a diet drink in 1961 then cast successfully in The Birds. According to Hedren, he offered her the role of Marnie during filming of The Birds. Hedren told writer Moral that she was "amazed" that Hitchcock would offer her this "incredible role", calling it a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity". In 2005, more than 40 years after the film's release, Hedren declared in an interview that Marnie was her favorite of the two films she made with Hitchcock, because of the intriguing, complex, challenging character that she played.

Male lead Sean Connery had been worried that being under contract to Eon Productions for both James Bond and non-Bond films would limit his career and turned down every non-Bond film Eon offered him. When asked what he wanted to do, Connery replied that he wanted to work with Alfred Hitchcock, which Eon arranged through their contacts. Connery also shocked many people at the time by asking to see a script; something Connery did because he was worried about being typecast as a spy and he did not want to do a variation of North by Northwest or Notorious. When told by Hitchcock's agent that Cary Grant did not ask to see even one of Hitchcock's scripts Connery replied, "I'm not Cary Grant." Hitchcock and Connery got on well during filming. Connery also said that he was happy with the film, "with certain reservations."

Marnie became a milestone for several reasons. It was the last time a 'Hitchcock blonde' would have a central role in one of his films. It was also the final occasion when he would work with several of his key team members, who had figured so prominently in his films: director of photography Robert Burks who died in 1968; editor George Tomasini, who died soon after Marnie's release and music composer Bernard Herrmann, who was fired during Hitchcock's next film, Torn Curtain (1966), when Hitchcock and Universal studio executives wanted a more contemporary 'pop' tune for the film. Hitchcock had noticed a strong similarity between Herrmann's score for Joy in the Morning and Marnie and believed Herrmann was repeating himself. Herrmann's music for Marnie included excerpts in his special album for Decca Records. Lyrics were written to Herrmann's theme that were to be sung by Nat King Cole.

Marnie continues to have its admirers, as actress Catherine Deneuve indicated that she would have loved to have played Marnie. Actress Naomi Watts dressed up as Hedren's Marnie for the March 2008 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Although they played mother and daughter, Latham (42) was only eight years older than Hedren (34).

Filming

In a making-of documentary for the DVD release, unit manager Hilton A. Green explains that shooting had been scheduled to begin on November 25, 1963, but had to be postponed because the nation was in mourning for John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated three days before.

Reception

The film was a moderate box office success; it grossed $7 million in theatres on a budget of $3 million. In North America it earned estimated rentals of $3,250,000.

Leonard Maltin has argued that Marnie was ahead of its time,^{[citation needed]} while in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto describes it as Hitchcock's last masterpiece.

The film's special effects are often criticized as unconvincing, with critics noting such things as obvious matte paintings and back projection.^{[citation needed]} However, in a making-of documentary on the DVD, Robin Wood, author of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, argues that they can be defended if one notes the roots of the film in German Expressionism:

[Hitchcock] worked in German studios at first, in the silent period. Very early on when he started making films, he saw Fritz Lang's German silent films; he was enormously influenced by that, and Marnie is basically an expressionist film in many ways. Things like scarlet suffusions over the screen, back-projection and backdrops, artificial-looking thunderstorms—these are expressionist devices and one has to accept them. If one doesn't accept them then one doesn't understand and can't possibly like Hitchcock.

Bibliography

• Broccoli, Albert R.; Zec, Donald (1999). When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli. Trans-Atlantic Publications. 
• De Rosa, Steven (2001). Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. Faber and Faber. ISBN 0571199909. 
• Gottlieb, Sidney; Brookhouse, Christopher, eds. (2002). "An Interview with Evan Hunter". Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0814330614. 
• Hunter, Evan (1997). "Me and Hitch". Sight & Sound (British Film Institute) 7 (6): 25–37. ISBN 9770037480038. 
• Smith, Steven C. (1991). A Heart at Fire's Centre: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. University of California Press. 
• Spoto, Donald (1983). The Dark Side of Genius. Ballantine Books. 

External links

• Marnie at the Internet Movie Database
• Marnie at AllRovi
• Marnie Eyegate Gallery
• Marnie Screenshot Gallery at Alfred Hitchcock Fans Online
• Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie