In 1964 and at the height of his creative and most successful period in filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock released Marnie. The great success of North by Norwest (1959), the phenomenal hit Psycho (1960), and the widely popular The Birds (1962) would indicate that the next film in Alfred Hitchcock's career would follow in the steps and live up to the high standards its three predecessing works had set. However, like the plot in many of the stories he took the screen, Marnie took an unexpected turn in Hitchcock's successful path. Some consider the film clumsy and lacking in classic Hitchcockian tension; others simply call it a notable failure. Marnie fell short in acceptance from audiences and critics because of its subject matter and its extreme sentimentality. Hitchcock set aside the intricate shots of The Birds, the unpredictable plot of Psycho, and the external action and turmoil of North by Norwest in exchange for a tale about obsession and the deep secrets that the mind harbors and later remerge only to terrify. All the elements from Hitchcock's past films are present in Marnie: a tension-filled plot, deceit, secrets, elaborate camera work and cinematography, significant use of color, and of course the icy blonde. Especially significant in Marnie are Hitchcock's use of color, metaphors, and the saturation of his personal obsessions in the film to create the psychological complexity and poetic cruelty in Marnie.

Mainstream audiences began to note Hitchcock's significant use of color when Grace Kelly's wardrobe grew darker as the plot thickened in Dial M for Murder (1954). Only six years earlier Hitchcock had made the transition to color with Rope and his films were beginning to gain an importance associated with the effective use of color. Color was of special consequence in Hitchcock's ultimate masterpiece Vertigo. Because Vertigo deals with the fallibility of memory and love, his use of green throughout the film enhances the ghost-like quality that Kim Novak evokes to James Stewart in the story. With Marnie, Hitchcock takes color to a level beyond the plot, to one that actually speaks to the characters and to the audience alike. The two most commonly associated colors with 'warning' are yellow and red. Hitchcock employs both in different and equally important ways: yellow speaks to the audience while red speaks to Marnie.

OPENING SHOT OF MARNIE MARNIE HOLDS A YELLOW PURSE

YELLOW TAXI CAB OUTSIDE MOTHER'S HOUSE

Yellow is constant throughout the film, present from beginning to end as means of warning the viewer of something that is about to happen. The opening shot shows a dark-haired woman carrying a yellow purse under her arm. Before we know what the film is about, Hitchcock's extreme close-up on the purse and the eventual fade into the words "robbed" as spoken to a character, warn the audience that something is wrong from the very beginning. Marnie herself is a compulsive thief. She disposes of her old identity with every theft and in the first instance 'leaves' her old belongings in a bus station locker. Not fortuitously, a yellow key chain holds the key she uses to lock her immediate past and later throws away. Marnie arrives at her mother's house in Baltimore in a yellow cab and another yellow cab is also the vehicle that takes her to the Rutland Accounting Firm, where she gets employed and meets the man who frees all the demons she carries inside in an attempt to save her and come to term with his own obsession. Yellow is also used in connection to a particular character, Lil. Before Mark Rutland becomes obsessed with Marnie, his deceased wife's sister has an infatuation of her own toward Mark. She is first introduced to the audience, and to Marnie, wearing a yellow dress amidst the formal wear of the rest of the employees at the firm. Lil's yellow dress is her way of warning Mark about Marine and also to the audience, for later in the plot Lil will be the one whose revelation to Mark leads him to push for Marnie's final salvation. Lil and Marnie will be in constant conflict through the rest of the film; Marnie pushes away the insistent Mark while Lil tries to gain his love.

GIRL WEARING YELLOW COAT OUTSIDE MOTHER'S HOUSE AT THE END OF THE FILM

Yellow is associated with another central theme in Marnie other than love. Yellow pencils are kept in the drawer where the code to the Rutland safe is gaurded. First-time audiences first notice the yellow pencils, then the code, and as Marnie peeks in in an attempt to see, we are made aware of the real reason why Marine is there in the first place. It is also a warning to her, for the Rutland theft is what leads her to Mark's attempted salvation of her. When Mark takes Marnie to meet his father, yellow flowers are set on the table, indicative that Mark is bringing home a girl who will only be trouble. Yellow flowers appear again during Mark and Marnie's honeymoon aboard a ship. These flowers become visible during the film's most controversial scene, before Mark's attack on Marnie. It is in this same scene that Marnie clinches to a yellow cushion for protection when Mark attempts to touch her. Yellow chrysanthemums are visible in the room where Marnie has her final nightmare before her breakdown. In this crucial scene, Mark becomes aware that something terribly wrong has happened to his wife and therefore sets out to save her even if it means placing his own interests aside. From this point on the plot becomes rather dark and somewhat disturbing, culminating with Marnie's mother confession to Mark and her daughter of the early events in Marnie's life. At the end of the film a girl with a yellow sweater plays outside Marnie's mothers house, warning Marnie and Mark that, although the storm has passed this one time, there will likely be trouble ahead since Marnie's complete recovery is not a part of the picture. Moreover, Marnie herself possesses the most striking and constant use of yellow in the film: her blonde hair is a constant warning to the audience that trouble is with her at all times and also serves as a reminder that the tribulations in her life are found in one's head.

SCARED OF THUNDER, MARNIE RUNS TO MARK FOR COMFORT

While not as significant to the film as yellow, red is another color Hitchcock employs to move the plot along. Red gladiolus at her mother's house put Marnie in a state of psychological shock. Hitchcock conveys her trauma by tinting the screen red as Marnie stares at a red object with discomfort. In a later instance, while Marnie is working late at Rutland's, a storm disturbs the seemingly peaceful office where Marnie types for Mark. The lightning outside scares her, the screen tints red, and Marnie begs Mark to "stop the colors." Mark kisses her while she in a trance-like state and when he later asks which colors she wanted him to stop, she replies that she does not remember. This gives Mark a hint that colors bring back suppressed memories from Marnie's mysterious past. A similar episode occurs when Marnie accidentally spills red ink on her blouse while at Rutland's. The screen tints red once again and Marnie rushes across the office into the ladies' room to wipe the red off her blouse. Red dots are present on a horse rider's shirt when Mark takes Marnie to the race track; seeing red causes Marnie to immediately want to escape. As the plot progresses, Marnie's conflict with the color red intensify. When Lil and Marnie ride their respective horses among a crowd of other riders, a rider's red shirt triggers Marnie's mind and she rides incessantly in no particular direction. This sighting of the color red and her loss of control lead to the death of her horse. Nevertheless, red becomes the element that pinpoints Marnie's trauma when, in the climaxing scene at her mother's house, Marnie's repressed memory plays before her eyes and reveals to her that red comes from the blood of a sailor she may have killed when she was a child. The significance of red is that it serves as the element that has been there all along triggering Marnie's memories of her haunting past.

Beyond color, there are many other metaphors that Hitchcock infuses in Marnie. As in all of Hitchcock's films, the dialogue bears special significance. Many themes within the film are revealed more often through dialogue than through the mere visual aspect of a motion picture. In some cases, the dialogue is subtle enough to make the viewer wonder why a certain scene is important to the film. The opening sequence shows Strutt saying "robbed" after he realizes his money is gone. He then describes Marnie as a girl "too good to be true," and one that was "always covering up her legs" as if these were "national treasures." As early as this point, the dialogue provides its audience with clues as to the kind of woman Marnie is. Strutt's statement that Marnie is too good to be true makes sense after we learn that Marnie changes identities constantly and is therefore never true. In addition, when Strutt says that she was always covering up her legs we get the first hint that Marnie is prudish, although the nature and extent to which she is straitlaced are not revealed until Mark and Marnie's honeymoon. When Marnie visits her mother after the Strutt robbery their conversation leads to her mother telling Marnie that "decent women don't have need for any man," and it is here that the issue of prudishness once again steps into the foreground. We now know that Marnie is prudish and we learn that her mother instigates it all. These clues become pivotal when the truth is revealed at the end.

Mark reveals his obsession toward Marnie when he decides to hire her without references. "You're not supposed to get it," Mark says to his cousin Bob after a decision to hire her has been made. He has recognized her from the Strutt theft (she was a brunette back then) and knows exactly that she is a thief. Hitchcock himself told Francois Truffaut in the Hitchcock interview that the reason Mark is obsessed with Marnie goes back to the fetish that he wants to get her simply because she is thief and nothing else (Truffaut 301). It is the role of the good girl attracted to the bad guy, but reversed in Mark Rutland. Dialogue also works as a battle of wits between Mark and Marnie, especially in the scene where Marnie works a Saturday afternoon to do extra typing for Mark. They converse as she types a paper about predators. He tells her he is a zoologist and specializes in the instinctual behavior of animals; she asks if this includes ladies' instincts as well. Mark asserts that lady animals "figure very largely as predators," while in fact the role of predator and prey reverse constantly between Marnie and Mark. After the storm and Marnie's lightning scare, Mark sees that she is vulnerable and says, "I wouldn't take you for a woman who'd be terrified of anything." His fetish and infatuation with Marnie become more evident as the plot progresses, for Mark is aware that vulnerabilities lie within the thief and he sets himself to dig them up.

MARNIE AND FORIO

"IF YOU WANT TO BITE SOMEONE, BITE ME."

Marnie reveals much of her vulnerabilities through her conversations with Mark. In avoiding his questions and giving seemingly evading answers, she discloses her fears and arouses an uncanny interest in her from Mark. At the racetrack, she tells him that she does not believe in love and that in fact she believes in nothing. When asked why she enjoys horses, Marnie replies that "horses are beautiful, unlike people." Mark then asks her if she had a tough childhood and her cold and aloof "not particularly" contribute to Mark's fascination with this woman. Mark now knows that Marnie substitutes horses with people and that something is hidden from the past; his infatuation includes finding out what she hides. After Marnie robs the Rutland safe, Mark finds her and blackmails her into marriage. "I was never interested in men," she tells Mark. Mark replies that his father admires animal lust. Confronted with the issue of lust and carnal desire, Marnie goes mad and screams "if you love me, you'll let me go." Her response indicates to sexual frigidity and to her inability to be possessed or a part of something or someone. During the honeymoon and before Marnie's much-debated attack, Mark tells her of an exotic and beautiful flower he encountered in Africa. He explains that up close, the flower was not really a flower but it was made up of tiny insects who, to escape the eyes of hungry birds, live their lives in the shape of a flower. It is in this description that Mark uncovers Marnie's duality and her constant need to bury her past in order to avoid getting hurt by someone else.

MARK TELLS MARNIE OF THE EXOTIC FLOWER DURING THEIR HONEYMOON

MARNIE REACTS TO MARK'S ATTACK

The process of hurting begins when Mark apparently forces himself on Marnie after she begs him not to touch her for she "cannot allowed to be handled." After the honeymoon, they return to Mark's home. "It's not exactly a house of correction," he tells her even though it is in the house that Mark will begin to look for a cure for Marnie. The use of the word 'cold' can also hint to Marnie's sexual frigidity when used outside of that context. Marnie complains of being cold while in the bedroom with Mark and he even asks her frankly "are you cold, Margaret?" Marnie takes an emotionally difficult sense as the healing begins. After her nightmare, Marnie begs Mark for help while in a semi-conscious state that has triggered past memories from her childhood. She mockingly quotes from the Bible as Mark reassures her that he will help her heal from whatever sickness she may have. "His tears shall wash away thy sins and make thee over again," she tells him before once again begging him for help. Marnie's mocking quote takes special significance when, as part of the healing process, Mark drives Marnie to her mother's home during a rainstorm.

The dialogue spoken during the final sequence, when Marnie learns the truth about her childhood from her mother, is especially striking. "She is lucky to feel like that," says Bernice to Mark when he demands that she tell her daughter of what really happened. Mark stresses, "When a child can't get love, it takes what it can get." His understanding of why Marnie is a thief becomes clear: turned off to the love of men and unable to feel any love from her distant mother, Marnie steals to make up for what is not given to her. She steals money because money can never buy the true love that she is unable to feel. Hitchcock closes the film with Marnie and Mark exiting her mother's house after the truth has begun to heal the wounds. The storm has passed and children play outside the house while they sing a nursery rhyme: "Call for the doctor, call for the nurse. Call for the lady with the alligator purse." The doctor and the nurse in the song point to Marnie's healing. Donald Spoto notes in his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock that the film opens with a close up of a purse and finished off with the last word spoken being 'purse' (340). It is also significant that the purse is an 'alligator purse,' for the alligator is a predator. A very sentimental and touching instance of the predator motif occurs after Marnie's suicide attempt during her honeymoon. After Mark pulls her out of the swimming pool he tells her that if she really intended to kill herself, then she should have jumped out to the sea. "I didn't want to be food for the sharks," she cries. Marnie, the predator up to this point, fears becoming prey; she fears becoming the food, the object, of someone/something else.

MARNIE'S SUICIDE ATTEMPT

PREY BECOMES PREDATOR: MARNIE SHOOTS FORIO

Beyond dialogue, Hitchcock also pays special attention to many of the elements that, seemingly unrelated or trivial to the plot, enhance the intricacy of Marnie. Mark preys on Marnie's emotions and thus the theme of 'predator' and 'prey' become significant to the plot. He is a zoologist and is fixated on Marnie. This puts Marnie in the position of the prey, of the hunter who suddenly becomes hunted. Mark goes from studying animals' instinctual behavior at the beginning of the film to reading books like Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female toward the end. Marnie becomes his subject matter; a subject more fascinating perhaps than animals, for animals prey because it is their instinct to do so whereas a human being must posses powerful reasons to prey on others. Mark reads Animals of the Seashore during their honeymoon aboard a ship and it is during this trip that it becomes unclear who the animal is. 'Does Mark rape Marnie?' is a question that the film asks but Hitchcock leaves unanswered in his film. After Marnie begs Mark not to touch her, he rips off her nightgown and embraces her against his yellow robe. Marnie cannot speak. Mark then lies on top of Marnie on the bed. Her face is half lit, half dark; his sight is fixed on her in a manner that suggests nothing but a mixture of lust and cruelty. Hitchcock cuts away leaving the situation up to the viewer. Marnie's half-lit face is not only significant of her own duality and her cracked identity, but also of the feelings she evokes on the spectators.

MARNIE ROBS THE RUTLAND SAFE. NOTE HITCHCOCK'S GEOMETRICAL USE OF THE SCREEN

HALF AND HALF: MARNIE AFTER BEING ATTACKED BY MARK

A great great example on the duality of Marnie occurs in the way Hitchcock directs the Rutland theft halfway through the film. The scene is shot in total silence. It is the most suspenseful moment of the film, reminiscent in more ways than one of Psycho. Hitchcock splits the screen in half by use of the way the cubicles are aligned, just like windows and large opened areas where split in Psycho. The anticipation that Hitchcock creates before the actual theft is similar to the tension that he created when Lila Crane is about to discover the real Mrs. Bates. On one side of the screen, Marnie opens up the safe and takes the money out. On the other half of the screen, an elderly lady arrives at the scene and begins to mop the floor. Neither of the women are aware of the other's presence at first, but in essence both are engaging in the same activity: cleaning. Marnie later becomes aware of the cleaning lady and once again Hitchcock uses tension better than anywhere else in the film when Marnie takes off her shoes and places them in her coat pocket. Hitchcock intercuts between the old lady mopping, Marnie's anxious stare, and the shoe in her pocket about to fall to the floor. The shoe falls, Marnie freezes, and the lady does not realize someone else is in the room. As Marnie leaves the scene unnoticed, the viewers are made aware that the maintenance lady has problems hearing -- a revelation that only adds to the irony in Marnie's fear of getting caught.

Marnie's duality is made clear most unmistakably in the fact that Marnie has two identities: one buried by the horrors of a childhood trauma and the other one disjointed and in desperate search for a new fake identity that would distance her from who she really is. Duality is also manifested in the events that Hitchcock shows in pairs in Marnie. Two scenes take place at her mother's house: early on in the story and the climax at the end. Marnie works late at Rutland in two occasions: the first time she displays her vulnerability to Mark, the second time he steals the money. Hitchcock shows Marnie riding Forio (her horse) against an artificial backdrop twice as well. Marnie's dualities merge into one when she utters the phrase that she perhaps unconsciously says whenever she finds herself in deep emotion. Marnie commits murder twice. First, she murders Forio after being startled by a rider's red shirt. Lil follows her, but this only causes Marnie to run away faster and drive Forio into a wall he is unable to jump over. Both Marnie and the horse fall, but Forio agonizes as Marnie watches. She runs for a gun and kills him in her inability to see him suffering. "There, there now," she quietly says in a child-like voice after she has put the horse out of his misery. A physical confrontation between Bernice and Mark at the end of film trigger a childhood memory in Marnie. She remembers her mother letting in a sailor from the street late at night. The sailor goes into Bernice's room. Little Marnie is afraid of the lightning and the storm outside and begins to cry. The sailor comes out and whispers in her ear; he kisses her cheek. As Bernice sees that the sailor is kissing her child daughter, she engages in a physical fight with him. Marnie, thinking that the sailor is hurting her mother, grabs a metal rod and hits the sailor hard on the head. "There, there now," she says as she sees the sailor rest his head. Terror breaks in when she realizes that she has drawn blood form the inert man. The blood fills the screen, Marnie screams, and the screen is tinted red for the last time. Hitchcock's metaphor of his use of the color red in the film makes sense when Marnie's ability to stand pain materializes and her dual persona comes together in one as Marnie finally comes to terms with the past. Reminiscent of the explication provided at the end of Psycho, Bernice explains in detail to Mark and Marnie the fateful events of that night with the sailor.

Rain and water are two of the elements Hitchcock uses masterly in Marnie. He shows only one of Marnie's physical transformations of Marnie in the film and it occurs at the very beginning. We see the first glimpse of Marnie's face after a shot of water running down a bathroom sink. The water then turns black as hair dye collides with it. We then see Marnie, as a blonde. Water serves as means for transformation and will also work as purification in the form of rain. When Marnie first shows her vulnerability to Mark at the Rutland building, a storm is blasting outside and Marnie sheds her first layer before Mark. Mark and Marnie's honeymoon takes place aboard a ship on the sea; when Marnie attempts to commit suicide she does so by jumping on the pool early in the morning. Her attempt to drown is indicative of using water as the ultimate form of liberation. Because she is not yet aware that she can be saved or rescued, she tries to liberate herself through death. That she employs water as the instrument to do this only makes sense in accordance to the rest of the instances where water is significant in the film. The final revelation at the end also comes amidst a storm. Marnie comes to terms with her past as the rain blasts outside. Once she has learned where her tribulations lie, she steps outside to see that the heavens have ceased to rain. The water from above has purified Marnie of the one obstacle that has kept her from reaching true happiness. However, while the last shot only provides hope, the ending to Marnie is a rather perplexing one for the sadness is felt in the characters, but no happiness is present.

It is easy to see why audiences would react negatively to Marnie and find that the final resolution is not a happy one. Bernice explains that she let young men into her house in exchange for money for she never really had anything. She explains of the conception of Marnie, saying that it was a result of her desire for a boy's sweater. Hitchcock plays with irrational fascination once again in the film. Bernice narrates how she wanted a sweater from a boy and in exchange gave her body to him. Marnie was a product of that obsession and it is indeed Mark's obsession with her that brings her back to the truth, to the point where all the chaos started. Hitchcock gives no clear resolution to the story. Marnie and Mark leave Bernice's house with the decision to get help for Marnie in the future. However, Hitchcock only allows seeing where the healing process has begun. It is interesting how the ending to Hitchcock's most successful films like Psycho and The Birds are not conventional ones and leave no room for hope, and yet these films were more widely embraced by mainstream audiences. What makes this film disturbing to people is that Marnie is neither healed not damned at the end of the film. Norman Bates is completely insane, yet captive at the end of Psycho. The Birds does not even have a definite ending, for the ending Hitchcock gave it leaves a sense of continuing terror. However, Marnie is shaken and affected by the circumstances of her life and no clear resolution has been provided for her. The ending of Marnie is only hopeful, but it cannot be called a definite solution to her problems.

MARNIE'S FLASHBACK MOTHER AND SAILOR ENTER THE BEDROOM

The unfamiliar ending to Marnie is only one of the many levels of complexity at which the film operates. In Marnie, Hitchcock created a very difficult film not only to understand but also emotionally difficult to watch. What makes Marnie so radically different from any other Hitchcock film is the sentimentality and romanticism that Marnie is soaked in. Marnie is a film about the search for true love and no other Hitchcock film deals with this subject matter in a manner so raw and unabashed. Vertigo deals with the fallibility of it and therefore an unhappy ending is almost expected. But Marnie asks that the ugly difficult aspects that a person buries in his/her mind be exposed, dealt with, and not necessarily solved. Marnie is almost poetic cruelty in that the main character suffers fools in her search for herself. It deals not only with Marnie's own grief, but also with how her grief and her discovery will affect those for whom she cares the most. The leading character is perhaps the most demanding female in any Hitchcock film. The difficulty of Marnie is only equaled by that of Madeline/Judy in Vertigo, for the characters in both films must dig deep into their soul in order to deal with the past. Tippi Hedren is especially outstanding in the leading role, one that is perhaps one of the most difficult and demanding female characters brought to the screen during the sixties. That Hitchcock was unsatisfied with her performance, as well as with Kim Novak's in Vertigo, only adds to the irony of why neither of the two films worked economically well despite being outstanding pieces of narrative art.

MARNIE CRIES AS SHE ATTACKS THE SAILOR

RED IS REVEALED: THE SAILOR BLEEDS

Marnie is not the honorable failure that critics have made it seem to be. It is a film that breaks the norm of what is expected of a Hitchcock film and of a narrative film in general. The tension is predominantly internal and reflected mostly in the characters' feelings as opposed to being represented in the action and suspense of the plot. It is the only truly 'romantic' Hitchcock film, but romantic in a very cruel manner. Marnie is one of Hitchcock's best works because of its effective use of color and metaphors to convey the obsession and psychological complexity of the film. Perhaps what is unsettling about it is its sentimentality. Marnie does not ask that its audience grieve; instead, it challenges us to think and to experience raw emotion in a manner that is even difficult to perceive. Perhaps because Hitchcock set such high standards for his previous films, mainstream audiences were not ready to deal with a work as emotional as Marnie. A favorite among devout Hitchcock scholars, Marnie becomes more and more interesting, more revealing, and more fascinating upon close inspection and repeated viewings. Like every great film, Marnie is one stays with the audience long after the screen has gone dark.

r.mata

Works Cited
Marnie. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal, 1964.
Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.