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Tippi Hedren, Sean Connery, Diane Baker, Martin Gabel, Louise Latham ... see more see more... , Bruce Dern , Bob Sweeney , Milton Selzer , Mariette Hartley , Alan Napier , Henry Beckman , S. John Launer , Meg Wyllie , Morgan Brittany , Edith Evanson , Louise Lorimer

Condemned as being a "disappointing" and "unworthy" Alfred Hitchcock effort at the time of its release, Marnie has since grown in stature; it is still considered a lesser Hitchcock, but a fascinating ... read more read more...one. Tippi Hedren plays Marnie, a compulsive thief who cannot stand to be touched by any man. She also goes bonkers over the sight of the color red. Her new boss, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) is intrigued by Marnie -- to such an extent that he blackmails her into marriage when he stumbles onto her breaking into his safe. Rutland is in his own way as "sick" as his wife because of his fetishist desire to cohabit with a thief. After innumerable plot twists and turns, Marnie is "cured" by a facile but mesmerizing flashback sequence involving her ex-hooker mother (Louise Latham). Among the critical carps aimed at Marnie was the complaint that the studio-bound sets -- particularly the waterfront locale where the film ends -- were tacky and artificial; curiously, this seeming "carelessness" adds to the queasy, off-setting mood that Hitchcock endeavored to sustain. Even when the direction seems to falter, the film is buoyed by the driving musical score of Bernard Herrmann (his last for Hitchcock). Among the supporting actors in Marnie are Mariette Hartley as a secretary and Bruce Dern as a sailor; twelve years later, Dern would star in Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

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28 critics

PG, 2 hr. 11 min.

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

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DVD Release Date: May 30, 2000

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Flixster Reviews (918)

  • cosmo313
    April 25, 2012
    cosmo313
    Hitchcock started to go downhill with this one, it's true, but, even though this film is a bit of a mess, it's not a complete and total loss. Basically, we've got a super disturbed woman named Marnie who is a compulsive thief ansd pathological liar. She's pretty bi-polar and has ... read moreall sorts of unresolved issues.

    She goes to work for a guy named Mark Rutland, and decides to rob him. Instead of turning her in, he's drawen to her, impulsively marries her, and becomes bound and determined to cure her of her mental issues. Not a whole lot of this makes much sense, and the pop psycholigy at work here is pretty bad.

    Yet, despite the nuttiness and confusion of all of this, and the fact that it's really overblown and drawn out, I still sorta liked it. You've got a solid performance from Tippi Hedren, who really goes off the wall here, and Connery, though a bit creaky, does a decent enough job as Rutland.

    The plot itself isn't all bad, but the screenplay is in need of some serious work. It was kinda hard for me to buy some of what was presented here, namely character motivations and the answers to Marnie's troubles. The film does look good though, and there's some excellent shots and sequences throughout, especially the safe robbery sequence. It's fairly suspenseful and pretty well done. Also, Bernard Herrmann's score (the last one he did for Hitch, I think) is also pretty nice.

    The film is well meaning, but all over the place. Like I said, it's not a total failure, but it is pretty flawed. I was still entertained by it though, so take that as some sort of recommendation.
  • fb1664868775
    December 2, 2011
    fb1664868775
    In my opinion a step up from The Birds, this film suffers from another poor performance from Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery doesn't really fit into the role.
  • spielberg00
    July 5, 2011
    spielberg00
    This film does not make much sense, but Hitchcock brings it way up from a single star, along with Connery and Hedren. Think of James Bond plus The Birds.
  • SirPant
    February 15, 2011
    SirPant
    Marnie is a little disappointing compared to Hitchcock's previous films. It's an interesting study in psychology, Tippi Hedren plays the lead role brilliantly but as for the rest of the cast (Sean Connery in particular) they're all a little wooden. I've sat through many a 2 hour ... read morefilm but this felt unnecessarily long and the pay off just doesn't seem worth it. It's still a good film but just a million miles away from Hitch's best.
  • ajv2688
    December 2, 2010
    ajv2688
    Marnie has the elements of a good Hitchcock film, but it isn't exactly in the same genre as most of his films: thrillers or horror or mystery. Instead this is a melodrama which includes a mystery. It's a thrilling romance, with racy (for the time) sex dialogue like North By Nor... read morethwest. But it's more about emotions. Marnie is also like Psycho, the main character Marnie has some deep psychological problems involving something that happened with her mother, which affects her love life with Connery's character. Marnie is a thief, who is caught by Mark (Connery), who falls in love with her, but has to unravel the mystery of her past. It's a very intense melodrama, and one of my favourite Hitckcock movies, I highly recommend it.
  • groaningbitch
    October 26, 2010
    groaningbitch
    marnie is probably the most hard-edged lesbian in hitchcock movies: incredibly beautiful and elegant, but not interested in man at all, never curious about the secret of sex, which she resents fiercely. pathologically enamour of her mother, who she even tries to kiss and hug in g... read morereat desperation. (molest mama?) this picture tells you about man's obsession with un-obtainable woman and his anxious vanity to melt her frigidity away as if that could give him great pleasure and sense of achievement for "catching something really wild" and un-tamable.

    even the ending looks positive, marnie finds the cause of her problem and why she's so afraid of "red" (blood)...the only one marnie loves and shows affection for is her mother whom marnie thinks doesn't love her. in the end, marnie is consoled that her mother does love her but coy to demonstrate her passion for the child. thus marnie is a picture of a perverse romance between a parent and her child, instead of man and woman. and marnie says she would rather be with mark instead of jail, so could it be that he becomes the father figure she's never had in her life? and the sean connery character becomes the pateral figure who attempts to coach a die-hard lesbian into woman so he could finally "consummate" with her like a naughty daddy tickled by the idea of "incest"....could that be happy ending? or tragedy with a faux-relief because marnie now is finally willing to conform to this gentlemanly rapist and consents to be his hostage?

    hitchcock askes the scriptor to add up the scene of attempted rape, and he has to fire the scriptor (who refuses that request) to have his ways of "raping marnie." there're also rumours (actually tippi hedren later admits some of them) that hitchcock's also highly "interested" in hedren but angery at her because of her persistent refusals . anyway, he wants to manipulate her life but she wishes to be independent. i assume that tension between hitchcock and hedren is projected into marnie.

    the original cast was intended for grace kelly, who turned it down for being princess of morocco. but this picture fits better with tippi hedren. i do wonder how come it get so many bad critics? what's so bad about it? i think marnie's kinda refreshing with the most hard-boiled hitchcockian blonde ever! she's practically the biggest iceberg there and almost impossible to melt! hitchcock usually has a way to embody the hostility between man and woman (some degree of misogynism, you may say), such as vertigo. his man always wants to tame the proud woman and manipulate her into the ways he wishes her to be, as if he gets his kicks that way. that sympton is surely rendered through marnie with greatest obsessional violence.
  • lewiskendell
    July 9, 2010
    lewiskendell
    "The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish."

    I wanted to like Marnie. No one can claim that I didn't try. But every time the movie started to become interesting for me, it would take a wrong turn and I'd be back where I started: unhappy that I had finally found a Hitch... read morecock movie that I didn't have at least somewhat of a favorable opinion of.

    Marnie has a story that is much more complicated than it initially appears to be. On the surface, it's about a thieving young woman and the wealthy man who catches her in the act, but the movie explores psychological issues that go far beyond the simple plot setup. We discover that Marnie is quite the complex, damaged character, and then the movie becomes about finding out why she is the way she is. This is a dark movie, no doubt. There's little humor or lightheartedness to be found, and the dour atmosphere only increases as it goes on. I'm usually a fan of that, but not here.

    I was surprised to be slightly disappointed in Tippi Hedren's performance. I loved her in The Birds, but in this movie she's so outshone by Diane Baker (in a much smaller role), that I can't help but be convinced that a different actress should have been found for the part. As for Connery, well...he was Connery. I had to constantly remind myself that this wasn't some odd, forgotten entry into the Bond franchise. Neither of the leads were suited for their roles, in my opinion.

    Marnie just wasn't for me. I can appreciate it for its ambition and I hope to watch it again one day to a different result, but this was the least entertaining Hitchcock movie that I've seen. Beyond a few scenes (the part with Marnie and the cleaning lady and the scenes following the fox chase, for example), I failed to see his talented fingerprints on this film.
  • ceWEBrity
    May 30, 2010
    ceWEBrity
    Alfred Hitchcock did some great character work in his time, but his employment of psychology has always been unsubtle at best. The most obvious example of this is the long-winded, useless dissection of Norman Bates's criminal transvestism in Psycho, but it's even more blatant and... read more pervasive in Marnie. We're made to understand very early in the film that Marnie has an unexplained fear of the color red; she sees a vase of flowers in her mother's house and tweaks out, and the screen floods with bright red light. Effective, if not a little over-the-top. What really pushes this device into hokey territory are its ten other occurrences throughout the course of the film. YES WE GET IT! BITCH IS AFRAID OF RED! For all the supposed stupidity running rampant in the films of today, the classics of fifty years ago sure weren't hurting for it either. Though it deserves credit for trying to get into its heroine's head, Marnie is scarcely more poignant or observant than any of today's half-assed psychological thrillers. To its credit, there are a few really interesting sections where answers and character traits are not force fed to us. One such scene occurs toward the beginning of the film, when Marnie is having a conversation with her mother, who is suspicious of all the money her daughter's spending. Marnie coyly informs her that the Bible says "money answereth all things," which deeply irritates her mother. Perhaps Marnie doesn't put much faith in religion, or perhaps she does, or perhaps she's just being a contrarian to get at her mother. Tippi Hedren is inconsistent and sort of hysterical through most of the movie, not quite the frigid resourceful thief we expect her to be, but her intelligent handling of this throwaway line tells us fifty times more about Marnie than Hitchcock's Freudian string pulling.

    What I found most interesting about Marnie is the constant moral gray area it maneuvers through. Really, none of these people are decent, but there's a sick sort of interest in trying to figure out whether the movie is telling you that Sean Connery is. And believe me, he's not. Is the movie really trying to pass this manipulative pseudo-rapist off as a hero? The ending positions him as both Marnie's savior and her superior, which to me points at "yes." But then it's sympathetic toward Marnie too...is the movie complex, or just confused? I'm thinking a little of both. Hitchcock's women have never been extremely strong, and are generally more reactive than proactive. Here Marnie often gets to push the action, but it's Mark who drives the story to its ultimate goal, which leaves us feeling a little cheated of a protagonist who works through her own problems. She's the more interesting character; she's the one we want to see taking the reins in the climax. Instead, we just get some horribly aged, cheesily filmed psychotic break.

    This is generally accepted as one of Hitchcock's missteps, and though its stature as a female-centric melodramatic thriller is unique among his oeuvre, it's easy to understand its failures. I left the movie feeling that it occupied my time well, and I had been exposed to a captivating portrait of an unusual woman, but at the same time I though it sort of humiliated her and gave way too much credit to Mark. I guess you could say that my personal dissatisfaction with it was no fault of the movie's, but my own; the ideology at its core seems rocky to me, however, and I can't help but feel that the movie's portrayal of Marnie cold have been a little more even.
  • ythelastman89
    April 29, 2010
    ythelastman89
    I really never found anything particularly great about Marnie. Itâ??s really odd and has about Two things going for it, Tippi Hedren giving a really loony performance and Hitchcock giving a lot of great looking shots. The rest of the film is just a mess. Sean Connery was horribly... read more casted and gave one of the worst performances of his career. The writing is incredibly bland and the ending is extremely predictable and corny. I think itâ??s one of the worst ways of trying to have a character with homosexual feelings. She saw her mom getting sexually abused as a child so of course sheâ??s going to hate men and have lesbian tendencies, what a horrible grasp of human emotions.
  • ScoopOnline
    December 29, 2009
    ScoopOnline
    A great Thriller, can I call this Movie a Thriller? A tiny bit over dramatized but absolutely recommendable for Hitchcock fans.

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Critic Reviews

Dave Kehr
March 20, 2012
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Universally despised on its first release, Marnie remains one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest and darkest achievements. Full Review

Variety Staff
September 12, 2008
Variety Staff, Variety

Marnie is the character study of a thief and a liar, but what makes her tick remains clouded even after a climax reckoned to be shocking but somewhat missing its point. Full Review

Eugene Archer
January 1, 2000
Eugene Archer, New York Times

At once a fascinating study of a sexual relationship and the master's most disappointing film in years. Full Review

March 20, 2012
Film4

A worthwhile watch for anyone who's ever enjoyed Hitchcock, but by comparison with his better known stuff it's an example style overtaking substance. Full Review

Kim Newman
March 20, 2012
Kim Newman, Empire Magazine

This remains a compelling Hitchcock thriller but it's Tippi Hedron's remarkable central performance which steals the show. Full Review

March 20, 2012
TV Guide's Movie Guide

A masterpiece of psychological mystery that encompasses all of the director's obsessions. Full Review

Leo Goldsmith
December 16, 2011
Leo Goldsmith, Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Marnie's Mama's house is a masterpiece of repressed emotion, a bland domestic space of seemingly placid creams and yellow, rendered in swirling wallpaper and upholstery patterns. Full Review

Josh Larsen
November 19, 2010
Josh Larsen, LarsenOnFilm

...a crazed and lurid character portrait that spends most of its time psychoanalyzing itself. Full Review

Cole Smithey
July 14, 2008
Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

A savory failure from the Master.

Jeffrey M. Anderson
May 16, 2008
Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

This messy bit of twisted psychological damage is arguably the most underrated film in Hitchcock's canon (though there's a lot of competition). Full Review

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    • Marnie Edgar: The colors! Stop the colors.
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Marnie Trivia

  • somebody said that Audrey Hepburn sang in My Fair Lady. Actually, it was Marnie Nixon that sang for her and that's why she didn't win the Oscar and Julie Andrews did.  Answer »
  • Tippie Hedren starred in these two Hitchcock films:  Answer »
  • Which colour provokes an adverse reaction in the title character of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie?  Answer »
  • Marnie Nixon never dubbed singing for which actress?  Answer »
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