Marnie (1964)

By John Chard

The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish. Sometimes cited as the last decent Hitchcock film, Marnie actually should be regarded as one of the maestro's best films full stop! A swirling mysterious tale of repressed sexuality and traumatic falsehoods, Marnie to me is one of Hitch's more accomplished works. Tippi Hedren is Marnie, a woman who is both a kleptomaniac and a pathological liar, but her problems are more deep rooted than the surface ones we see. Sean Connery is Mark Rutland, he catches Marnie out for robbing the safe at his company and we then follow the two on a journey to get to the bottom of the demons that are gnawing away at Marnie - to the point that flashes of red and the touch of Mark send her into terrified panic. With bleak back drops and fluctuating climate conditions, Hitchcock pulls the audience into Marnie's troubled psyche, and with Hedren's perfectly tense and wrought performance fittingly snug, the film delivers the goods for a fine Hitchcock viewing. As usual some scenes are priceless Hitch, a nightmare sequence with a tapping hand at the window hits the mark, while a scene involving a horse thumps the emotive heart and steers the film towards the special finale. Top stuff all round from the master director. 9/10