Marnie
Short description
Marnie Edgar moves from one office job to the next under assumed names, gaining her employers' trust before emptying their safes and vanishing. When she takes a position at a publishing house run by Mark Rutland, he recognises her: one of her earlier victims is a client of his. Rather than hand her over to the police, he keeps her secret and pressures her into marrying him, hoping to understand the fears that drive her. Her distress runs deep, tied to her mother and to things she cannot name, and Mark's attempts to reach it meet resistance he did not expect.
Alfred Hitchcock directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Jay Presson Allen. Tippi Hedren, who had starred in his previous film The Birds a year earlier, plays Marnie opposite Sean Connery as Mark; Diane Baker, Martin Gabel, Louise Latham and Bob Sweeney appear alongside them among a credited cast of forty-two. It was the thirty-eighth of the forty-three features Hitchcock directed.
Made for about three million dollars, the film took roughly seven million worldwide, a modest return for a Hitchcock release of the period. Audiences have generally rated it well: on IMDb it sits at 7.1 from around fifty-seven thousand votes, and on TMDB at 7.1 from a much smaller pool of about twelve hundred. A critics' score of 7.2 from forty-five reviews places it slightly above those viewer ratings.
What's left behind the scenes
- During filming, a conflict arose between Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, and he threatened to ruin her career. Shortly thereafter, the director gave the actress's five-year-old daughter, Melanie (future Melanie Griffith), an unforgettable gift – a doll depicting her mother lying in a small coffin. Despite this, Tippi Hedren calls "Marnie" her favorite film in her career.
- Paramount executives suggested Lee Remick to Hitchcock for the lead role. Marnie could also have been played by Eva Marie Saint, Susan Hampshire, Vera Miles, and director Sydney Pollack's wife, Claire Griswold.
- The director's cameo – at the fifth minute, Hitchcock emerges from a hotel room and watches Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) and a servant with purchases walk away down the corridor, then turns his head towards the audience.
- Diane Baker was not allowed to read the script until she agreed to participate. She only knew three things – the film was called 'Marnie', it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and Tippi Hedren played the lead role.
- Alfred Hitchcock wanted Grace Kelly, by then already Princess of Monaco, to return to the big screen and play the lead role in this film. However, the residents of Monaco and the royal family were not enthusiastic about the idea of Kelly playing an unstable thief.
- Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen made Mark's hobby zoology because it was her own interest, and also because Mark, based on his knowledge, psychoanalyzes Marnie in the film.
- Dianne Baker recalled that during the filming of the episode where Baker's character overhears a conversation between Marnie and Mark, Hitchcock approached her, placed his hands on her face, and literally showed her the expression he wanted from her in that scene.
- Joseph Stefano wrote his own version of the script, which was much closer to the original source material, and included two characters absent from Hitchcock's film: a psychotherapist to whom Mark takes the main character, and Terry, Marnie's colleague who is in love with her.
- Louise Latham, who played Marnie's mother, suggested Jay Preston Allen to Hitchcock. She and Louise were classmates at a boarding school in Texas.
- Renowned biographer Donald Spoto, in his book about Hitchcock, “The Dark Side of Genius,” called “Marnie” Hitchcock’s last masterpiece.
- Louise Latham plays Tippi Hedren's mother, although Latham is only 8 years older than Hedren.
- In 2008, Vanity Fair magazine organized a photoshoot dedicated to the work of Hitchcock. Actress Naomi Watts portrayed Marnie in the shoot.
- Initially, Evan Hunter adapted Winston Graham's novel. Hunter insisted on removing the episode in which Mark rapes Marnie from the script, as he considered it base and would cause Mark to lose respect in the audience's eyes. Hitchcock fired him and hired Jay Presson Allen, who decided that the character's behavior and Sean Connery's charisma would subsequently 'justify' Mark.
- “Marnie” was the last film for which Bernard Herrmann composed the music (prior to this, he had collaborated with Hitchcock seven times).
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