Marnie (film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the novel Marnie by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. The original music score was composed by Bernard Hermann.
Plot summary
Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a troubled young woman who has an unnatural fear and mistrust of men, thunderstorms and the color red. She is also a compulsive thief. She uses her charms on Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel) to get a job without references. Then late one night, she steals the contents of the company safe and disappears.
Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), a widower who owns a large printing company, is a good customer of Strutt's. He learns about the theft from the victim, and remembers the woman. So when Marnie applies for a job at his company, he is intrigued. He is robbed too, but unlike Strutt, Mark manages to track Marnie down. Instead of handing her over to the police, he blackmails her into marrying him.
On their honeymoon, he finds out about her frigidity. At first, he respects her condition, but her undisguised hostility to him incites him to rape her. The next morning, she tries to commit suicide, but she does not succeed, as Mark finds her in time.
He attempts to discover the reasons behind Marnie's behavior. In the end, Marnie and Mark learn that her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), had been a prostitute. When Marnie was six years old, one of her mother's clients (a sailor played by Bruce Dern) had tried to calm her after she became frightened by a storm. Bernice thought he was trying to molest her daughter and began attacking him. Seeing her mother struggling with the man, Marnie struck him with a fireplace poker, killing him. The bloodshed led to her fear of the color red, as a result. Once the origin of her fears is revealed, Marnie decides she wants to try to make her marriage work.
