Film According to Mr Cinema review: "Marnie" 1964

Alfred Hitchcock made “Marnie” in 1964, just after “Psycho” (1960) and “The Birds (1963). This film was more of a return to some of his earlier working approaches, being somewhat stylistically similar to “Rear Window” (1954) (it included the patented “Rear Window zoom”) and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956) in its visual approach. The movie’s story is as follows: Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a compulsive thief and liar, she is conned into marrying Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), even though she is repulsed by the mere thought of men. This results in a series of events which leads to the uncovering of her mysterious, clouded past.

While watching “Marnie”, I felt something was amiss, the acting was fine, the direction was of Hitchcock’s brilliant standard and all of the technicalities were in order. After the film I realised that for the longest time in the middle of the film, the story didn’t really move, didn’t really go anywhere. This pacing problem did bring down the film a bit (though not enough to make it a really bad film). The film was about 130 minutes long, this could have been cut down to 70-90 minutes easily. This film was supposedly going to be a dialogue orientated movie; however the dialogue did lag at times in Marnie. All in all not a terrible film, but not up to the standard that Hitchcock set for himself in most of his movies.

Rating: 6.5/10