Film

Marnie (1964)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Often criticised for its lack of suspense - a quality that underlines its similarity to Vertigo - this is neither thriller nor psychodrama, even though it deals with wealthy Connery's marriage to frigid, kleptomaniac Hedren. Rather, it's a perverse romance (from a novel by Winston Graham) which seeks less to explain its eponymous heroine's 'problems' than to examine a relationship based upon extraordinary motivations: Connery, in deciding to marry the woman who has stolen from him and betrayed his trust, is clearly as emotionally confused and unfulfilled as the woman whose mind and past he attempts to investigate. As such, it's as sour a vision of male-female interaction as Vertigo, though far less bleak and universal in its implications. That said, it's still thrilling to watch, lush, cool and oddly moving; though the claims of some devotees, arguing that the obviously artificial backdrops are a Brechtian device to make plain Marnie's alienation, are hard to swallow.

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