Marnie

Alfred Hitchcock's fascination with ice princess blondes is well-documented over the course of his career from Grace Kelly to Eve Marie Saint to Kim Novak. The director said blondes showed up better on the screen, and that if he used brunettes, the audience would be instantly suspicious of them. Of the three mentioned above, I enjoyed the movie or movies they were in, but with one Hitchcock blonde, Tippi Hedren, I just don't understand her appeal.

Early in her career, Hedren didn't make that many movies, but two she made with Hitchcock rise above everything else she did, The Birds and Marnie. Her character was annoying in The Birds, but the movie as a whole made up for it so I was able to look past my initial dislike for the character. Not so easy with Marnie which rests almost solely on her performance.

Hedren plays Margaret 'Marnie' Edgar, a woman in her late 20s who moves around to the bigger cities on the east coast, gets a job in an office, and after a few weeks on the job proceeds to rob the office safe. Getting away with several thousands dollars, she sends some to her mother (Louise Latham) and then moves on to another job. But after a handful of successful jobs, Marnie pushes her luck to far and is caught by her boss, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery).

Completely under his power as to what Mark can do, Marnie has no way to escape. Mark presents two options, one, go to the police and turn her in, or two, marry her because (GASP!) he's fallen in love with her and try to figure out why she's a compulsive thief. That's not all that's bothering Marnie though, she freaks out when she sees anything red, and she won't let any man touch her, not to mention all she wants is a hug from her mother.

The movie builds and builds to this big revelation but doesn't really offer anything to keep the audience excited or even interested in the meantime. At over 2 hours -- runtime of 131 minutes -- this is a dialogue-heavy movie as Connery's Mark tries to unravel the mystery that is his frigid wife Marnie. It just feels like a lazy effort from Hitchcock with Marnie's tendencies and phobias introduced early and just repeated over and over again until it's time to reveal the twist.

When the twist does come, it's not much of a surprise at all. SPOILERS It's basically a rehash of Psycho, and it's been hinted at the whole movie. If you haven't figured out that something traumatic happened to Marnie during her childhood about halfway through, you're probably not paying attention. Maybe it was shocking at the time, but watching it over 40 years later, it comes across as ho-hum. If nothing else, the flashback reveal does give a young Bruce Dern one of his first movie appearances.

On to my feelings on Hedren. Kelly, Saint, and Novak, among others, all had something that made them likable onscreen. Kelly is probably the most similar to Hedren with her prim and proper attitude, but there was something personable about the future Princess of Monaco. With Hedren, you just get this high and mighty holier than thou feeling. And because she's in basically every scene in the movie, it can be a bit of a drag with her overacting and wooden deliveries combining into one behemoth.

Looking at Hitchcock's career as a director, he made over 50 feature films and most of them are considered classics or at the least high-quality thriller and suspense movies. But with Marnie, I just didn't understand its appeal. It is slow-moving from the beginning, and the performances come across as too stagey. I'll stick with Psycho or North By Northwest until someone convinces me otherwise about this clunker.

Marnie <---trailer (1964): * 1/2 /****