What went wrong with Alfred Hitchcock’s most problematic film ‘Marnie’?

Posted On June 26, 2025June 26, 2025

Maybe Alfred Hitchcock was born into the wrong generation. Preoccupied with sex (and particularly its denial), he was working at a time when censorship made the topic all but taboo. He found ways around this inconvenience, breaking the three-second kissing rule by having his actors intermittently smooch for three whole minutes and cueing some very orgasmic fireworks the moment Cary Grant and Grace Kelly passionately embrace in To Catch a Thief.

But in Marnie, he took a much more direct approach to his favourite topic and revealed a little too much about the so-called ‘Master of Suspense’.

There are no serial killers in Marnie, no hitmen or deadly international espionage. Instead, it focuses on a compulsive kleptomaniac played by Tippi Hedren who poses as a bookkeeper at a string of businesses, earns the trust of her co-workers, and robs their safes. One of her victims is a wealthy businessman named Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) who, instead of turning her in to the authorities, becomes obsessed with understanding her.

The movie is treated as a mystery. The colour red triggers a physical reaction in Marnie that leaves her reeling and crying out. Her mother, played by Louise Latham, who was injured in an accident when Marnie was a child, is distant and cold with her. And she has a powerful aversion to male touch. Hitchcock was fascinated by psychoanalysis, making it a key plot point of films including Spellbound and Psycho, but while he might have thought that the root of Marnie’s psychological problems was the standout arc of the film, it’s the coercion and sexual violence that truly take centre stage.

Mark’s obsession with Marnie isn’t the sort of self-destructive but non-violent obsession that Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo has for Kim Novak. His obsession is born out of darkness. He doesn’t just want to understand Marnie; he wants to possess her. At the beginning of the film, before she washes her dark hair dye out to reveal her natural blonde locks, he describes her as “the brunette with the legs”, a description that is exhaustively invoked again and again in the way Hitchcock frames her.

How Marnie exposed the darkest side of Hitchcock’s obsession

Although Marnie shows no romantic interest in him, Mark takes advantage of her terror during a thunderstorm to embrace and passionately kiss her. Later, he coolly informs her that he intends to marry her, and that if she refuses, he will turn her in to the authorities. He arranges a honeymoon on a cruise ship, and although he seems resigned when she tells him that she can’t stand the thought of sexual intimacy, he later comes into her room, rips her nightgown off, apologises, and then rapes her. Her subsequent suicide attempt only seems to make him more fascinated by her psychology.

Hedren’s performance is the greatest in any Hitchcock film. She perfectly portrays the oscillations between a quietly competent employee, a coldly calculating thief, and the anguish of mental illness. She also captures the blank rigidity of trauma as Mark assaults her, a chillingly silent moment of terror that leaps off the screen.

It is impossible to ignore what was happening off-camera. Before she became a star, Hedren was a fashion model with no acting experience when Hitchcock spotted her in an advert and asked to meet with her. She agreed to sign a seven-year contract with him, and he proceeded to assert control over every aspect of her career and increasingly, her personal life.

Some of it was invaluable, such as the extensive acting and movie training he provided in the lead-up to their first film, 1963’s The Birds. But much of it was intrusive. He hired two men to keep tabs on her and report back to him about her movements. He instructed her on what to eat, what to wear, and whom she should and shouldn’t see.

After the success of The Birds, Hitchcock cast Hedren as the lead in Marnie, and his controlling behaviour escalated. He began to isolate her from the rest of the cast and insisted that she spend time with him alone at the end of each day. Eventually, he asked her to touch him. When he made an explicit demand for sexual favours, she flatly refused, leading to a complete breakdown in their relationship. They had to work through an intermediary for the rest of the film, and Hitchcock vowed to ruin her career. He kept her under contract, but she refused to make another picture with him.

In this light, Hedren’s performance and the film’s sexual violence appear even darker. Off-camera, she was being held hostage by a controlling man with whom she was contractually obligated to work. In front of the camera, she was being held hostage by a controlling man who also held her under a contract, albeit a marital one.

There are critics who have re-evaluated Marnie and deemed it to be an unhinged masterpiece of sorts, a dizzying exploration of mental illness, obsession, and lust. But there is a thematic confusion at the heart of it that makes it confounding and ultimately, irredeemable. Marnie might have experienced a violent childhood trauma that makes her pathologically averse to sexual intimacy, but that isn’t the “reason” for Mark’s controlling behaviour and violence. A rapist is a rapist. There are no mitigating factors.

At the end of the film, we discover the truth about Marnie, that, as a child, her mother, who was a sex worker, attacked one of her clients when she thought he was assaulting her daughter. Panicked by the ensuing violence, the young Marnie accidentally killed the man, leading to her lifelong aversion to sex and the colour of blood. “Of course I’m a cheat and a liar and a thief,” Marnie whispers through tears after recounting the story at her mother’s house, “But I am decent”.

Standing over her, Mark offers her some simplistic psychoanalysis, “Marnie, it’s time to have a little compassion for yourself. When a child—a child of any age—can’t get love, it takes what it can get, any way it can get it.” He embraces her gently, and through her tears, she murmurs, “I don’t want to go to jail, I want to stay with you”. Mark guides her out the door and into his waiting car, finally having brought her to heel. He has forgiven her for the trauma that scarred her, and she is just grateful that he’s still there. It’s a chilling ending, even if it wasn’t meant to be.

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