Part of the Alfred Hitchcock Sound Era Films In Chronological Order project.

There are those that believe that Marnie was Hitchcock's final masterpiece - but it really wasn't.

A complex melodrama that attempts to tackle several different subjects at once, it never really makes any of them interesting enough to care much about them. The one or two of them that look as though they could be very interesting are not elaborated on at all or end up being dropped altogether. Marnie is a maddening film that ends up feeling more like Hitchcock biting off more than he can chew.

He had proved that he could tackle complex and well-woven relationship drama-thrillers with Vertigo but there is a feeling of…

61/100

Occupies a spot almost precisely halfway between the warped glory of Vertigo and the leaden idiocy of Spellbound. I know some folks argue that we're supposed to embrace the latter in this instance, viewing Marnie's repressed trauma as a correlative to (e.g.) the Expressionistic matte painting at the end of her childhood street, but one of my many failings is an inability to take seriously any psychological case study rooted entirely in a single slice of backstory that Explains Everything. (As a counterexample, think of how the final scene of Exotica complicates that template. Or, hell, think of Vertigo itself, which gives you the traumatic incident right up front and doesn't pretend it has any bearing on Scottie's mania.)…

You Freud, me Jane?
-Marnie Edgar

Originally Marnie was planned to be Grace Kelly's big return to films under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock no less. For various reasons Kelly backed out of the project with the most common belief being that the people of Monaco wouldn't have approved of having their Princess portraying a sexually disturbed kleptomaniac.

Hitchcock kept the rights to the novel, but put the film on hold with Kelly's departure while he went on to make The Birds. He ended up offering the lead of Marnie to Tippi Hedren in the middle of shooting The Birds regardless of what the studio was suggesting. Sean Connery on the other hand was offered the role after Hitchcock was…

Fairly certain I've seen this before, but couldn't really recall much of it, so I'm taking it as a first watch.

It's an adaptation of Winston Graham's novel of the same name and relocated to the States. I'm quite fond of Graham's writing but this seems to be an overlooked entry in Hitch's impressive catalogue, and I'm not entirely sure why.

It's a tight taut psychological mystery with Graham's habitual powerful love (albeit a twisted kind of love, with benefits) story at its core. Hiychcock creates a great atmosphere throughout to essentially build up to the reveal at the film's finale. I've seen some criticisms that Hedren failed to convince in the role of Marnie, but to be honest I…

Well, this is an interesting one. Marnie finds Hitchcock doing something similar to what he did in Vertigo, taking psychological hang-ups--there, romantic obsession; here, sexual repression--and exploring them via one of his usual brand of suspense plots. Unfortunately, for this conceit to work, the thriller elements have to have some kind of thematic relevancy to its characters, and in the case of Marnie, anything to do with the titular character's career as a thief feels both underdeveloped and unnecessary to the central ideas, rendering a good portion of the film kind of a bore. There's also the strange issue of Sean Connery's performance, he still in jokey, cool-as-ice James Bond mode and seeming out of place in all but one…

My Hitchcock box set was a little sidelined last week and so I was eager to return. I've been told that it's all downhill following The Birds (1963), and I can certainly see Marnie being the start of a slippery slope. It's not that I didn't enjoy this film - I just found it be quite average (which is a rare response from me in regards to Hitchcock). There were certain plot elements, such as why Sean Connery's character Mark was so enamoured with Tippi Hedren's Marnie, which I would have liked to see embellished. I also thought the character of Lil - played by the attractive Diane Baker - would have benefited from some more screen time. There are…

Marnie is a film I was really excited for. The idea of Alfred Hitchcock and Sean Connery coming together is beyond awesome. The end result is a film that's...weird. For me, the biggest problem is a clash of tones. Is the relationship between Marnie and Mark demented and sad or romantic and helpful? The film flip-flops between the two when it should be clear the relationship is disturbing. It's really fucked up, and when the film tries to play off Mark's actions as heroic I find it jarring. Additionally, the film has a lot of conflicting ideas which never come together fully and on the whole lacks energy.

Thankfully the film has some solid elements. Despite my problems with Mark's…