Based on Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, Marnie is arguably a showcase of Alfred Hitchcock at his perverse best. For no British director of his time ever seemed to address the fascination with sex that people have purely as a result of how fucked up it can render a person. Adapted for the screen by Jay Presson Allen (yet another female writer who had to masculinize her name to be taken seriously) for a release in 1964, the slow burn of a tale unfolds with a constant tension, as though we might never know the true source of Marnie Edgar’s (Tippi Hedren, fresh from her starring role in Hitchcock’s The Birds) sexual aversion.
That the script was written by a woman so often shines through in her vitriolic one-liners upon being forced into a marriage with her erstwhile employer, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery). For instance, after given no choice but to marry him or be given up to the police for her thievery (she has a penchant for finagling jobs in quintessentially boring offices and then gaining enough intel to steal money from the safe), she is then hurled onto a boat for a honeymoon in the South Pacific where the last thing she wants is to be touched by Mark. Offering her a drink as a means to calm her down, she yells, “I don’t want it. Just leave me alone! The only way you can help me is to leave me alone! Can’t you understand? Isn’t it clear? I cannot bear to be handled!” Mark demands, “By anybody? Or just me?” She replied, “You. Men.” Puzzled by the admission, he returns, “Really? You didn’t seem to mind at my office that day, or at the stables. And all this last week I’ve handled you. I’ve kissed you many times. Why didn’t you break out into a cold sweat and back into a corner then?” She states, “I thought I could stand it if I had to.”
Rather than being hurt by her cold manner and refusal to have sex with her own husband (even if she is a blackmailed wife), he inquires, “Have you always felt like this?” She replies in the affirmative, to which Mark further probes, “Why? What happened to you?” She scoffs, “Happened? Nothing. Nothing happened to me. I just never wanted anybody to touch me!… I didn’t want to get married. It’s degrading. It’s animal!… Oh, men! Say ‘no thanks’ to one, and bingo, you’re a candidate for the funny farm. It would be hilarious if it weren’t pathetic.” But Mark isn’t buying her “I’m simply frigid bit” even in the slightest, going about his own investigation into her past as he becomes increasingly fascinated with her unprecedented behavior. Much to the dismay of his technically “former” sister-in-law, Lil (Diane Baker), who has been lying in wait to take her now dead sister’s place ever since Mark became a widower. Unfortunately, her attempts to make Mark lose interest in Marnie only seem to pique his obsession all the more, for when she slips him a tidbit about having overheard her talking to her mother in Baltimore–despite Marnie having claimed to have no family–he delves deeper into the nature of her Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female (as one book title he’s reading parades).
Not content to buy any of her lies or the whitewashing of her own obviously sinister narrative, Mark enlists a P.I. for his quest to unearth Marnie’s deeply recessed secret. In the meantime, he does his best to keep her complacent in their marriage by bringing over her horse, Forio, which she kept at a stable in Virginia. Her love of horses, she is quick to comment, far outweighs any affection she has for humans and, in fact, one of her early “bonding” experiences with Mark is at the racetrack in Atlantic City (just a stone’s throw from Philadelphia, where the Rutland Company is based). It is here that she is recognized by yet another person on the periphery of her cons in the guise of alter egos, something Mark is quick to dismiss as he does not yet want her to be aware of just how aware he is of her criminal activity. After all, as a former zoologist, his interest in capturing her as a means to study and domesticate her usurp the idea of engaging in any normal behavior, like turning her into the police for stealing from both Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel), in whose office he first heard of the stolen money, and his own company.
No, the prospect of letting this “creature” back out into the wild without first trying to tame her himself would be unfathomable to Mark. Even if it results in more than one ghastly scene–like Marnie attempting to drown herself in the pool on the massive cruise liner they’re on and then explaining to Mark why she didn’t just jump into the ocean, “The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish.” It is during moments like these we realize just how much the scenes of so-called romance come across as violent and sinister, whereas actual scenes of violence seem to adopt a romantic lens that only exists in the cinematic world of Hitchcock.
And while Mark delves into her past, he saddles her (no horse pun intended) with books to read about what he perceives as her “condition,” demanding of whether or not she’s looked at them, “Your new homework?” She balks, “Frigidity In Women? The Psychopathic Delinquent and Criminal?” He nods, “Have you read them?” Marnie lays on the venomousness with, “I don’t need to read that muck to know that women are stupid and feeble and that men are filthy pigs! In case you didn’t recognize it, that was a rejection.” But the surlier she becomes, the more determined Mark is. What’s more, he’s already raped her on their honeymoon anyway (in a scene of particular macabreness), so perhaps he feels he owes it to her to truly “fix” her. Even if he is blatantly aroused by her constant displays of being permanently traumatized. For one man’s damaged goods is another’s perpetual hard-on.
Which is why it’s almost too suspicious that Mark should be so expedient to take Marnie back to the source of where all her phobias began–from the sound of a thunderstorm to the sight of the color red–her mother’s house. For a house is not a home at Bernice’s (Louise Latham), a terse woman who exhibits no warmth or feeling toward Marnie at any point during the film despite all her attempts to make her do so by lavishing her with presents thanks to her skill at robbery. When the truth about what happened to Marnie as a young child is revealed, it is only then that Bernice can lightly admit to loving her daughter–that she took the fall for a particular crime precisely because of that love. But oh, whatever will Mark do now with a more highly emotionally functioning wife? This much can only be left to the imagination of a sequel.
