YMMV / Marnie

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Marnie's dislike of men and utter terror of being intimate with Mark have led to some people suggesting she might be a repressed lesbian. She has quite a bit of tension with Lil to back it up.
  • Some interpret Lil as Ambiguously Bi. She loves Mark, but also seems to have some Belligerent Sexual Tension with Marnie.
• Broken Base:
  • Easily Alfred Hitchcock's most divisive film. It's either a brilliant examination of psychosexual themes that was ahead of its time, or an overripe Freud Was Right melodrama with Tippi Hedren doing a bad Grace Kelly impression.
  • When it came out, there were debates over whether Marnie had a Slow-Paced Beginning and improved once the story got going - or else had a promising first half but went off the rails as soon as the marriage happened.
• Fridge Logic: The house that Marnie stops at when trying to Mercy Kill her horse doesn't have a phone. After Marnie's done the deed, Mark gets a call from Lil about it. So where did Lil phone from? Did she run around the area trying to find another house with a phone when it would be more practical to follow Marnie back to the house?
• Les Yay: Sometimes you get the impression that Lil wants to have Marnie to herself. It's even noticeable the very first time Lil sees "Mary Taylor" waiting to get interviewed for the job at Rutland, and asks "Who's the dish?"
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Mark goes to great efforts to track Marnie down and make her his. The entire portion of this film is very awkward to watch when you learn that it's also a reflection of how Tippi Hedren was treated during the making of it. Hitchcock hired people to follow her, micromanage every aspect of her life and eventually told her to make herself available sexually to him. When she refused, he responded by ruining her career.
  • Revelations about Sean Connery, and his statements in interviews, make the domestic violence angle a little too based in reality to be comfortable.
• He Really Can Act:
  • An important role for Sean Connery, since it showed that he could be a strong leading man outside of James Bond films.
  • The consensus view these days is that, even though she lacks subtlety, Tippi Hedren does a good job conveying Marnie's wounded psyche and inner turmoil.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Watch this and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte back to back, and you'll find that Bruce Dern makes a habit of being brutally murdered in the backstory of a mentally ill heroine.
  • Almost a half-century after this film, Tippi Hedren's granddaughter Dakota Johnson would also play the female lead in a story about a woman's complex sexual relationship with a moody corporate executive who has a not-so-hidden dark side.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Marnie is basically a Sociopath, but she's so screwed-up and gets so helpless when she encounters her various psychological triggers, you feel sorry for her.
  • Her mother becomes one after you learn about her Dark Secret.
• Narm:
  • The screen flashing red and Marnie's subsequent freakouts at these triggers are incredibly on the nose and un-subtle. They're up there with the infamous nightmare sequence from Vertigo.
  • Marnie's freakout when spilling ink on her blouse and her attempts at staying cool in the bathroom. She goes on and on about everyone making a fuss, when she had one of the most elaborate freakouts possible.
  • Most of Diane Baker's performance as Lil is ridiculously extreme. Of special note is her over-the-top attitude when she claims her hand is too sore to write.
  • The child actress playing Jessie is also quite extreme - resulting in a very unsubtle scene where it looks like Marnie, a grown woman is literally fighting with a child over her mother's attention.
• Narm Charm: Marnie slipping back into a southern accent while remembering her childhood trauma. It's a little silly but still works in the context of the scene.
• Offending the Creator's Own: The film has often been accused of misogyny, and it was also Hitchcock's only film to be completely written by a woman (albeit an adaptation of a Winston Graham novel).
• Once Original, Now Common: A double whammy. Tippi Hedren later attributed the film's poor reception to the fact that it was shocking how it tackled the effects of childhood trauma, as well as discussions on psychology and sexuality, which wasn't done at the time, making it too original. But from modern perspective, the themes Marnie deals with just seem passé or haven't aged particularly well, because just so many other works did the same stuff and did so better.
  "People didn't talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put all that into a film was shocking."
• Poor Man's Substitute: As in The Birds, Tippi Hedren was the last of Hictchcock's attempts to find a substitute for Grace Kelly. Sean Connery was likewise called a poor substitute for Cary Grant.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Melody Thomas Scott, who went on to play Nikki Newman on The Young and the Restless, as young Marnie in the flashback scene.
  • Also in the flashback is Bruce Dern, in only the third film of his career, as the sailor who young Marnie kills. He went on to star in Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot.
• Special Effects Failure: The sky and the ship in the background of the exterior shots in Baltimore are very obviously a painting. Even Hitchcock later admitted that it looked fake.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • On the surface it seems like a totally different beast from Psycho, since it's in color and plays more like a melodrama than a horror film, but there are some intriguing connections between the films. They both open with a woman named Marion stealing a large amount of money from her boss. And they both focus on a Woobie-ish serial criminal whose deviant behavior and sexual peculiarities stem from a domineering mother and a horrific childhood incident.
  • You can also view it as a variation on Rebecca, with Mark as Maxim de Winter, Marnie as the second Mrs. de Winter, and Lil as Mrs. Danvers.
• Strawman Has a Point: Marnie makes a very good point with the following line when Mark is trying to psychoanalyze her. Bear in mind, Mark's attitude to being conned is to track the culprit down and force her to marry him. And he tries to make Marnie out to be the only one with issues.
  "Oh, men! You say "no thanks" to one of them and BINGO! You're a candidate for the funny farm."
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Lil's dislike of Marnie ultimately goes nowhere. All it amounts to is discovering that Marnie's mother is still alive and inviting Strut to a dinner party, which forces Marnie to admit to Mark that she's robbed other people. While these do affect the plot, both could have happened without Lil's help and she disappears in the third act - so her subplot is never given a decent payoff.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The sailor that Marnie murdered to rescue her mother. It's not clear what he did to make Bernice start attacking him, but he seems to take a while before he finally fights back, making it look like Bernice jumped to a conclusion and he was merely defending himself. What's more is that Marnie killed him while he was defenceless.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Mark hasn't aged well as a protagonist, particularly his obsession with tracking Marnie down and trapping her in a marriage with him. While on the honeymoon, despite Marnie begging to be let go, he actually rapes her and is never punished by the narrative for it.
• Values Dissonance: Mark rapes Marnie on their 'honeymoon', invoking the Marital Rape License and never gets any comeuppance for this - and Marnie even seems to fall for him for real in the end! Even back when the film was being made, other crew members tried to convince Hitchcock to take that scene out, finding that it made Mark impossible to sympathise with. Evan Hunter's objections got him fired as the screenwriter.
• Vindicated by History: Opened to mixed reviews and decent-but-not-outstanding box office in 1964. Now it's often considered Hitchcock's last great film (with The Birds and Frenzy as the main challengers for that title).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The old age make-up used on Louise Latham for the present day scenes. It was so convincing that when she appeared without it for the flashback scenes to Marnie's youth, most of the crew thought it was a different actress!

---