!!! WARNING: ATYPICAL INVECTIVE TO FOLLOW !!!
I have always felt that The Birds was the last masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock. From that point on, the quality of his work decreased and the tedium increased. However, I was discussing Marnie recently and the conversation made me think that I was too harsh in my assessment, even though I had seen it several times and never came away amazed by anything in it.
I had the opportunity to watch it again and now I can say with perfect confidence that it is a bad, bad film. Perhaps future viewings will change my mind, but I doubt it. In fact, I doubt there will be future viewings.
What is wrong with it?
Where do I start?
1- Technical Problems:
a- The set gimmicks of Hitchcock always stand out as poorly executed and distracting from the rest of the movie. I am thinking of the ‘vertiginous’ zoom in/out of the stair case in Vertigo, for example. In Marnie, the red filter that tells us that Marnie is having one of her sexual hysteria panic attacks triggered by that color are laughable and laid on with a sledgehammer. I know that Hitchcock is lauded, and rightly so, for his use of ‘pure cinema’, i.e., emotion and information transmitted by purely visual means, but this is so clumsy. And I don’t think it is just a matter of less sophisticated special effects in 1964.
b- The process shots are extremely hokey. Is this be because they don’t work as well in color as in black & white? Maybe. The process shots of the riders during the hunt are phony looking and I do not think it is because we are now used to CGI ‘realism’ in special effects. It is hard to imagine why a perfectionist like Hitchcock okayed them. ‘Tippi’ Hedren looks like she is on a carousel and not on a fox hunt. The action is out of sync with the process shot background and ruins the illusion of horseback riding rather than creating it. This b&w shot looks somewhat better than the color image in the film, but you can see what I mean.
c- So many scenes end awkwardly. Often a character finishes speaking, but instead of a fade out, the camera just hangs on the character, and you think, “Nu? Is there more to this scene?”, and then the fade comes and the next scene begins. I don’t get it. What was the editor thinking? What is supposed to be the effect? Or is it, as I fear, more sloppiness and proof positive that Hitchcock lost interest in the project midway through and was not concerned any longer with turning out a typically perfect product?
2- Acting
a- Perhaps the greatest liability in the film is ‘Tippi’ Hedren. She already seemed out of her league in The Birds. I am sure we could think of any number of actresses of the time who would have been a better Melanie Daniels, especially when she is in confrontation with the juggernaut of Jessica Tandy as Mitch Brenner’s needy mom. But somehow, in The Birds her weaknesses are not detrimental to the whole enterprise. Her iciness and model-like behavior seems in keeping with a the portrayal of a troubled rich girl.
In Marnie, her inexperience sinks the whole enterprise. An actor’s greatest asset, even more than his or her physical presence, is a powerful and communicative voice. This is what can rivet an audience and what can direct them to feel the way he or she feels.
Hedren just does not have that voice. Hers is highly pitched and when she forces it into dramatic expression, it sounds like Minnie Mouse. I blame Hitchcock. She should never have been cast in a role that needs so much dramatic nuance. Diane Baker, who plays the devious Lil in the film, would have been so much more effective in the role. It is like watching Guys and Dolls listening to Brando sing Luck be a Lady, knowing all too well that Sinatra is on the set NOT singing Luck be a Lady.
Sean Connery also brings his share of problems to the film. Yes, he is gorgeous. I heard that Hedren complained to Hitchcock that it would be hard to play frigid opposite such a hunk. But for all that, there is very little chemistry between them. This time around I was really distracted by Connery’s Scottish accent. The way he goes in and out of the accent is another indication of lack of supervision at the top.
3- Psychology
At the end of Psycho, the psychologist, played by Simon Oakland, gives a tidy explanation of what happened in poor, murderous Norman Bates’ mind to give rise to so many horrors. While the explanation is plausible, I always felt that it was filmed and played with a laugh up its sleeve. I can’t put my finger on it, but I always find the end of Psycho kind of humorous. The comic relief, icky though it is, that we needed after such unrelieved tension.
The amateur analyzing of Marnie by Sean Connery’s character is even ickier. He claims to have had an interest in zoology and the way he traps and experiments on Marnie seem very zoological and not very medicinal. It certainly goes way beyond the medical dictum of ‘Do No Harm’.
Much psychologizing in films of the 60s and earlier seem to imply that if we could just find the one thing that made this character go nuts, we could cure him or her. Once the memory of having to kiss her dead grandmother at the wake in The Three Faces of Eve is recovered, all the multiple personalities magically disappear. When Gregory Peck in Spellbound finally recalls how he accidentally caused his little brother’s death, he is cured.
And so in Marnie, a visit to her awful mom’s dockside house revives once and for all a nightmarish memory that turned the young Marnie into a frigid, thieving, duplicitous woman, we assume that she is cured. It’s just too neat.
The bottom line here is that if you think you would like to watch Marnie, do yourself a favor and watch The Birds again.
The Discreet Bourgeois 