When you’re looking at someone whose output was as varied and prolific as Alfred Hitchcock, one tends to create tiers – and considering he is perhaps the greatest filmmaker to work in the English language, there are quite a few masterpieces littered throughout his career, as well as a few failures. Marnie is somewhere in the middle, occupying a central tier that indicates that it is a perfectly adequate directorial achievement, a solid psychological thriller that Hitchcock could churn out without all that much effort, but which never rises to the dizzying heights of the director’s previous four films, which stand as either his finest achievements (Vertigo), his most popular (The Birds) or a blend of both (Psycho and North by Northwest). Not quite his last time (he still had four to go after this), Marnie did signify the end for a few of the director’s more notable themes, such as that of a “Hitchcock blonde” (even though I’d argue Barbara Harris’ wonderful portrayal of your average pseudo-psychic in Family Plot is one of the most effervescent creations made under Hitchcock’s direction), or his working relationship with some of his artistic collaborators, and something of the end of an era – Hitchcock would make a few more films before his passing, but none of them were as quintessentially his own as much as this -and for better or worse, Marnie is an interesting experiment, managing to be a dark and perverted thriller that doesn’t hold back on the more challenging subject matter, while still being fiercely defiant in staking its claim as a worthwhile late-career effort from a director that had grown accustomed to making these kinds of labyrinthine thrillers. You can accuse it of being the product of artistic complacency, but there’s no denying that Marnie is still a decent film – and considering it hails from the mind of this particular director, its unsurprisingly sufficient in achieving what it set out to do, even if its squarely in the middle of Hitchcock’s long-line of works.

Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a young, enigmatic woman who is never able to stay employed at one place for too long – it’s not a symptom of any kind of laziness or ineptitude, but rather a result of her engaging in a life of petty crime, stealing from her various employers before fleeing and changing her identity. She’s a mysterious individual, plagued by several fears and inflicted with insatiable nightmares that terrorize her on a nightly basis, causing her to act in erratic and unpredictable ways. She soon finds herself under the employment of Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a wealthy businessman of what appears to be Scottish extraction, and who takes an instant interest in his new employee – but when she tries to swindle him in the same as her previous employers, Marnie finds herself dealing with a very different kind of man. Mark is not one of the milquetoast, upper-class bureaucrats she is used to encountering – he’s an intrepid man who holds his own deeply-guarded secrets, and whose intentions are not always as pure as Marnie would think. Despite these odds, they still manage to fall in love, attempting to learn as much about the other as they can, eventually discovering beneath their veneers, there are two very twisted individuals who will do anything to get ahead, regardless of the cost. Mark attempts to uncover the various mysteries that underlie his new wife’s existence, coming to realize that her past is littered with tragedies and obstacles that have led her to become this unstable, but deeply conflicted, young woman, who is capable of far more malice than he or anyone else could ever predict, proving that she truly does mean danger, even if she doesn’t realize it herself.

The problem with Marnie is that it doesn’t quite have a hook in the same way as Hitchcock’s other films that follow similar thematic territory. The titular character of Marnie is, in theory, a fascinating figure, a complex young woman who defies expectations by being more than just an alluring object of desire to the dashing hero (who is wisely relegated to a secondary role for much of the story). However, in practice, these characters are far less compelling, and hardly anything remarkable, which goes against what anyone who has encountered a Hitchcock film, even his most lurid, will have come to expect. The lack of a discernible narrative hook results in a film that is certainly more character-driven, but not in the way that would make for particularly resonant viewing. Marnie is very much a Hitchcock film insofar as it is compulsively watchable and always thoroughly entertaining but at the expense of something more solid and coherent. Arguably, we can consider this a shortcoming that manifested during the process of adapting Winston Graham’s pulpy source novel to the screen, but we’ve seen Hitchcock do wonders with even the most paltry of material. From the outset, we can simply say that the biggest problem that comes with Marnie is the disparity between intention and execution – the film didn’t have a story all that interesting, and thus couldn’t effectively tell it without resorting to the default standard of simply being a perfectly passable thriller that has depth, it just doesn’t realize it. It seems wrong to speak of a Hitchcock film as “having potential”, but it’s still worth noting how Marnie is filled with some great ideas, with many of them not manifesting in a way that was all that indicative of what we knew the director to be capable of, which is quite an abstract concept when talking about Hitchcock, who very rarely misstepped, even when dealing with something as convoluted as this.

Another problem with Marnie is one that I fear may be something of cinematic hearsay, because it deals with Tippi Hedren’s performance. One of the most notable “Hitchcock Blondes”, Hedren made her place in cinematic history with her work with Hitchcock, collaborating with him twice – previously on The Birds, and as a replacement for Grace Kelly as the titular petty criminal in Marnie. Hedren was, as controversial an opinion this may be amongst those who bolster these actresses through their participation in timeless classics, not all that great of an actress, and while she had the benefit of acting across a bevvy of screeching seagulls and Rod Taylor in The Birds, there wasn’t much in this film to distract from the more notable weaknesses in her acting. To her credit, she does exactly what was expected of it – but considering how character-driven Marnie is, and how other actors in the same film are delivering with smaller or more inconsequential roles, Hedren’s portrayal of the main character leaves a lot to be desired. She has shown herself to be decent in later work but just can’t rise above the bland characterization given to the role in this film. Sean Connery, on the other hand, does the best with what he’s given, playing Mark as an upstanding citizen who slowly realizes that his charming smirk can be a powerful tool of persuasion. Connery doesn’t get the credit he deserves as a great character actor, always being known for his most iconic role, which makes his performance in Marnie so surprising, since he’s operating from a distinctly different set of skills that weren’t unbeknownst to audiences, but are still quite unexpected for a performance given by Connery at his peak. He does manage to bolster Hedren quite a bit, being quite formidable in how he commands the screen, but managing to give her the space and exposure she needed to make this character far more interesting than it would appear. Their chemistry is very good and had Marnie made more of an effort to explore their relationship instead of constantly jumping to the next scene, we might have had a masterpiece.

Looking at it purely from the perspective of genre, Marnie is a film that doesn’t do much else than be a solid psychological thriller – and while it may not be made from too many moving parts in the same way some of the director’s more notable entries into the genre, there are still some surprises lurking beneath this otherwise straightforward film. Ultimately, Marnie is a film that functions as something relatively simple, neither affording any potential criticism the chance to comment on the weaknesses of the story nor going too far into ambition to lose sight of its very elementary goals. This is not a film that offers much more than it purports to on the surface, and in this regard is quite successful. However, there’s a certain insidiousness simmering below the film, a kind of anger that would seem almost misplaced had Hitchcock not been meticulous in ensuring every frame of his films were there on purpose – what some may call tonal inconsistency turns out to be one of the film’s most interesting aspects, a kind of subversions of expectations that Hitchcock handles very well. Had Marnie been led by a more traditionally-charismatic actress (as was the original intention), there’s no doubt she would’ve brought a more nuanced approach to the character, making the titular role not simply a conflicted woman venturing into a life of crime, but a complex figure who exists as a comment on the class struggle, a theme that persists throughout this film, particularly in the interactions between Marnie and her mother. Marnie is essentially a human drama masquerading as a daring psychological thriller, and considering how far this theme has been explored in other films the director made in his long career, its something of a disappointment that it didn’t quite work all that well here.

There’s a poignancy to the approach Hitchcock takes with commenting on the intrinsically human elements of the story, and when blended with the traditional twists and turns of the Hitchcockian psychological thriller, its surprising that Marnie didn’t take the time to iron out the kinks and flourish since it had all the elements needed to be a resounding success, and instead came out an uneven, frustrating bundle of promising ideas that should have been far easier to realize. There are some strange choices made in Marnie, many of them coming from a flawed characterization of the main character and her intentions, which aren’t always made clear through the constant use of her as more of a narrative tool than developing her as an individual, which should have been the first priority. However, flaws aside, Marnie is a solid film and has many of the quintessential elements we have come to expect from a Hitchcock film – it’s almost hypnotic in its form, making fascinating use of space and colour to create an atmosphere of uneasiness, and the humour underpinning the film does add some nuance to an otherwise bleak story that doesn’t have much to go on other than its simple story. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it hits some worthwhile heights that prove Hitchcock could make something of even the most paltry material. It is a great entry into the wide canon of psychological thrillers, and perhaps with some rumination, I may become more lenient towards it, as while I wasn’t all that impressed with its general style or some of the choices it made, there was a spark of something special somewhere in there, which indicates there is something more to Marnie than meets the eye.