Would his touch end Marnie's unnatural fears or start them again?

Thief... Liar... Cheat... she was all of these and he knew it!

"You don't love me. I'm just some kind of wild animal you've trapped!"
Only Alfred Hitchcock could have created so suspenseful a sex mystery!
From Alfred Hitchcock with sex and suspense.

On Marnie's wedding night he discovered every secret about her . . . except one!

Alfred Hitchcock's love stories start where others fail to go!

The more he loved her . . . The more she hated him . . . For trying to unravel her secret!


Condemned as being a "disappointing" and "unworthy" Alfred Hitchcock effort at the time of its release, Marnie has since grown in stature; it is still considered a lesser Hitchcock, but a fascinating one. Tippi Hedren plays Marnie, a compulsive thief who cannot stand to be touched by any man. She also goes bonkers over the sight of the color red. Her new boss, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) is intrigued by Marnie -- to such an extent that he blackmails her into marriage when he stumbles onto her breaking into his safe. Rutland is in his own way as "sick" as his wife because of his fetishist desire to cohabit with a thief. After innumerable plot twists and turns, Marnie is "cured" by a facile but mesmerizing flashback sequence involving her ex-hooker mother (Louise Latham). Among the critical carps aimed at Marnie was the complaint that the studio-bound sets -- particularly the waterfront locale where the film ends -- were tacky and artificial; curiously, this seeming "carelessness" adds to the queasy, off-setting mood that Hitchcock endeavored to sustain. Even when the direction seems to falter, the film is buoyed by the driving musical score of Bernard Herrmann (his last for Hitchcock). Among the supporting actors in Marnie are Mariette Hartley as a secretary and Bruce Dern as a sailor; twelve years later, Dern would star in Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot.


The film was a moderate box office success; it grossed $7 million in theatres[1] on a budget of $3 million. In North America, it earned estimated rentals of $3,250,000.[14] Marnie was the 22nd highest grossing film of 1964.
Leonard Maltin has argued that Marnie was ahead of its time,[citation needed] while in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto describes it as Hitchcock's last masterpiece.[15]
The film's special effects are often criticized as unconvincing, with critics noting such things as obvious matte paintings and back projection.[citation needed] However, in a making-of documentary on the DVD, Robin Wood, author of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, argues that they can be defended if one notes the roots of the film in German Expressionism:
[Hitchcock] worked in German studios at first, in the silent period. Very early on when he started making films, he saw Fritz Lang's German silent films; he was enormously influenced by that, and Marnie is basically an expressionist film in many ways. Things like scarlet suffusions over the screen, back-projection and backdrops, artificial-looking thunderstorms—these are expressionist devices and one has to accept them. If one doesn't accept them then one doesn't understand and can't possibly like Hitchcock.


Release Date: July 22, 1964


Distrib: Universal


Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the novel of the same name by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.
Evan Hunter produced initial drafts of the screenplay, but was replaced by Jay Presson Allen after creative differences. The original film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann.