- Location: Wilson Library (laptop)
- It's a good thing Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a crook, because she'd have trouble getting good employment references. She has a habit of taking jobs with safes, and a worse habit of making off with whatever cash was once inside of them. One gets the feeling that most of her bosses are like Mr. Strutt (Martin Gabel), who stammers about her good looks when trying to describe her to the police. In between thefts, Marnie returns home to visit her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), a cane-walking misandrist who projects an air of detachment. Has she forgotten all the things Marnie has done for her mother? More on that later. For now, it's a quick change of hair color and a stopoff at the stables before Marnie heads off to another job in another town.
- Marnie's next boss, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), is not so easily fooled. From Strutt's description and a half-remembered meeting, Rutland guesses Marnie's identity and hires her knowing exactly what she'll do. An amateur zoologist, he seems taken with the idea of having this particular wild specimen in his midst. He is especially fascinated with Marnie's ferocious panic attacks that appear to be triggered by thunderstorms and the color red. While Rutland is keeping an eye on Marnie, however, she has both eyes on the safe, eventually taking advantage of Mr. Ward's (S. John Launer) charming inability to remember the combination. After tiptoeing past a (deaf) cleaning woman, she makes her escape only to run into...Mark Rutland. It took some work, but he managed to track her down at the stables. As I'm sure is obvious, this means they'll have to get married before the week is out.
- The rest of the film details Rutland's bizarre, coerced courtship of Marnie. His approach is exactly that of a trainer who traps this wild creature before training her to be his wife. His expectations of her, including "wife follows husband to front door, gives and/or gets a kiss," are spelled out in excruciating detail, and he forgoes the usual love poetry for excerpts from "Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female," a favorite of the O'Neill library. Complicating the situation is Rutland's jealous sister-in-law Lil (Diane Baker), who lets slip that Marnie's mother is still alive. In the film's revealing climax, their visit to mother enables Rutland and Marnie to discover the singular cause of Bernice's limp, Marnie's attacks, and the Edgar family's feelings toward men. The terrifying answer? Bruce Dern in a sailor suit.
- Although Marnie has many of the same trappings as Spellbound and Vertigo, the film doesn't work quite as well as some of Hitchcock's earlier psychological thrillers. That's not to say that Marnie isn't eminently watchable. On the contrary, Hedren and Connery both deliver excellent performances, and Hitchcock's use of color is as good in this film as any. The main problem lies with the characters, I think. Rutland is so forcefully manipulative that it is impossible to completely identify with him. While Marnie is more sympathetic, her hysteria occasionally ventures into the absurd, making their relationship more of a curiosity than something the audience feels invested in. When they end up together at the film's conclusion, I find myself wondering if that was really the best outcome for them or, for that matter, for us.
- I spotted Hitchcock in the hall near the beginning.
