Marnie (1964)

((SPOILER ALERT))

3/10

I have a question for Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock, if you've come back from the dead and are reading my blog, were we supposed to just ignore the fact that in the middle of Marnie, Sean Connery fucking RAPES HER? I might be just a tad too forward thinking to enjoy this movie, but I'm pretty sure that even in 1964, rape wasn't really acceptable. It might have been overlooked, or underprosecuted, but I don't think it was accepted. Can anyone who was alive during this time tell me if I'm wrong? I'd really like to know, because it really bothered me that Marnie was raped and attempted to kill herself, and then later Rutland still was seen as her hero. WHAT THE FUCK, Alfred Hitchcock? What the fuck? This is how I summed up the after-effects of that ridiculously terrifying scene:

"Dear, what on earth are you doing?" [insert Scottish accent here]

"Oh, just going for a bout of suicide. It's your fault, you know. You know I hate to be touched."

"Well, don't die for too long. I have to psychoanalyze you later."

Seriously. I think her exact words were, "I was trying to kill myself, not feed the damn fish." And then the events on the Honeymoon were never brought up again!! It was like it was all a dream. That is, if you dream about rape and suicide. No big deal. Just two of the most intense traumatic things that could ever happen in a person's life. Why put them in if they're never going to be talked about again? What's the point? Besides making Sean Connery look like a dick, which, apparently was not the point of this movie.

Now this is what gets to me: I thought that normally in movies, the creep (you cannot deny that a man who says he wants to collect a woman as a trophy because he's caught a wild animal is a creep) is normally exposed or put in jail at the end. Even in Hitchcock movies, the villain normally gets vanquished. But not this time! Oh no, Rutland is seen as her savior, and she actually wants to stay with him at the end! The girl has some serious psychological issues that can't be solved by one night of remembering what happened. You know why? Because HE IS NOT A DOCTOR. He's just a creeper who's obsessed with her and wants to "fix her" so that she'll actually agree to have sex with him. That raping thing is just too damn strenuous. It strains the eyes. 

You can tell that I really did not like this movie. In rating it, I tried to be objective, but even then, I found myself thinking that even the cinematography is not as good as Hitchcock's other films. I think anyone who watches can agree that it's not his best, but the story really set me over the edge. The feminist in me finds it repulsive, and the filmmaker in me isn't impressed enough to override my original disgust. The greenscreens shots were cringingly apparent, and when Marnie flew off of her horse, I actually laughed at the blatant not-keeping-with-momentum special effect. Alfred Hitchcock was fucking loaded at this point- it wouldn't have taken much to hire a physicist to say, "People don't fly that far or straight when they're thrown off of a horse." Done. The only reason it gets a 3 is because of the one brilliant scene with Marnie taking the cash and the janitor making her way towards her on the other side of the partition. That shot alone salvages this movie, and I'm sure Hitchcock has used it before, but to be nice I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. 

Peace!

The Movie Mistress