There are, in many lives and art movements, defining moments that are ruptures, seminal changes, paradigm shifts after which nothing will be the same anymore: Marnie, the Hitchcock's movie released in 1964 after two masterpieces like Psycho and The Birds, marks the beginning of the end for the artistic developments of one of the most important and beloved directors of the XX Century.
The story of films is full of movies that, underrated by critics or ignored by the vast public, are nonetheless very beautiful and interesting, but unfortunately Marnie does not belong to this group; the negative reviews and the box-office flop appear, even after many years, the natural and inevitable outcome of a movie that not even the immense artistic credits of its director can save from a sad but heavy low mark. Surely, keeping the artistic heights of the previous two movies was most likely impossible, but such a major fall was hard to predict as well!
The basic idea could have been intriguing and experimental: a thriller without a whodunnit, where the progressive discovery of the causes at the roots of the protagonist's pathologies was the only uncertainty, not even too difficult to detect though, could have freed the narrative to roam freely towards an in-depth analysis of the fascination of the male protagonist for ethology, delving on his ambivalent role of a therapist, aiming to heal and free Marnie from her phobias, and of a mentally ill patient, obsessed with a serial thief and a compulsory liar, possibly a screen projection of the known obsession of Hitchcock for Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly's inadequate replacement.
Alas, none of the above is found in Marnie: Tippi Hedren's acting, already mediocre in her debut role in The Birds, becomes here plain lack of nuances and expressiveness, a handsome but rigid Sean Connery a distant, pale reflection of Cary Grant, the basic scenes and the high-school psychology handbook level of the script prevent the viewer, even the more casual or the Hitch's die-hard fan, to get involved, captured by the plot and the characters.
Along the years, many have tried to reconsider Marnie, offering benevolent analyses that justified with artistic merits the evident artificiality of some film settings or amplifying the chromatic choices of some of its scenes; even if understandable in light of the values of Hitchcock's overall body of films, mostly they appear only a nice but timid and unconvincing try that cannot succeed in offsetting the bitter aftertaste that Hitchcock's genius has entered with Marnie its Sunset Boulevard, from which the next and final four movies will not deviate, without though undermining the fundamental role and place of the British director in the history of cinema.
The story of films is full of movies that, underrated by critics or ignored by the vast public, are nonetheless very beautiful and interesting, but unfortunately Marnie does not belong to this group; the negative reviews and the box-office flop appear, even after many years, the natural and inevitable outcome of a movie that not even the immense artistic credits of its director can save from a sad but heavy low mark. Surely, keeping the artistic heights of the previous two movies was most likely impossible, but such a major fall was hard to predict as well!
The basic idea could have been intriguing and experimental: a thriller without a whodunnit, where the progressive discovery of the causes at the roots of the protagonist's pathologies was the only uncertainty, not even too difficult to detect though, could have freed the narrative to roam freely towards an in-depth analysis of the fascination of the male protagonist for ethology, delving on his ambivalent role of a therapist, aiming to heal and free Marnie from her phobias, and of a mentally ill patient, obsessed with a serial thief and a compulsory liar, possibly a screen projection of the known obsession of Hitchcock for Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly's inadequate replacement.
Alas, none of the above is found in Marnie: Tippi Hedren's acting, already mediocre in her debut role in The Birds, becomes here plain lack of nuances and expressiveness, a handsome but rigid Sean Connery a distant, pale reflection of Cary Grant, the basic scenes and the high-school psychology handbook level of the script prevent the viewer, even the more casual or the Hitch's die-hard fan, to get involved, captured by the plot and the characters.
Along the years, many have tried to reconsider Marnie, offering benevolent analyses that justified with artistic merits the evident artificiality of some film settings or amplifying the chromatic choices of some of its scenes; even if understandable in light of the values of Hitchcock's overall body of films, mostly they appear only a nice but timid and unconvincing try that cannot succeed in offsetting the bitter aftertaste that Hitchcock's genius has entered with Marnie its Sunset Boulevard, from which the next and final four movies will not deviate, without though undermining the fundamental role and place of the British director in the history of cinema.