When the BBC released the results of its poll of an unknown number of international critics about their favorite American movies, Alfred Hitchcock made the list five times – for Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious ... and Marnie (at number 47). This placement sparked the usual groaning. Why Marnie and not Rear Window? Of all the directors represented on the list, Hitchcock was the most likely to have numerous masterpieces between his first American film in 1940, and the last “good ones” in the early 1960s. But Marnie has become a particularly vexatious point of debate among some film quackers over the years, especially since Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films, the first book in English on the director’s career, in which the late scholar dedicated a chapter to defending Marnie from dense critics. Since then, the debate hasn’t died down. Talk about notorious!
The BBC 100 has only re-ignited the controversy. Who were these writers who picked the film and how could it rise so high in the list? For some reason this information is difficult to track down, but then, I’m notoriously bad at Google searches. A synecdoche of the ire the film inspires is one blogger who alternates between year-round Oscar predictions, industry grievances, and proper cinematic sideburns disguised as diary entries. In a few error-filled columns, the blogger ran down Marnie and mocked those who came to its defense. On the other hand, critical luminaries such as Glenn Kenny and Dave Kehr have long been supporters of Marnie.
The debate, or at least the resistance to Marnie as a film worthy of inclusion in an all-time best list exposes an interesting chasm within the critical community, to use the term loosely. Despite the blogger’s call for some kind of weird vigilante attack on Marnie lovers, which unfortunately the Internet is all too easily roused to do these days – for which see the lynch mob mentality over the second season of True Detective, – Marnie is unlikely to go away or its champions be suppressed. There is already one whole book on the making of the film, Marnie figures significantly in the so far hundreds of books on the director, and the latest issue of CineACTION!, the Canadian film journal that Robin Wood helped found 30 years ago, coincidentally features a cover story on Marnie.[1]
The conflict isn’t between “tradition of quality” types like the blogger who finds films such as Shane the pinnacle of Hollywood craft versus the egghead intellectuals with no sense of how an audience interacts with a film, though the conflict is probably in part that. It’s that there is a third way. Yes, some academics do “read too much” into a film particularly if they are drawing upon Freudianism and other bankrupted ideologies. But go back and read the Marnie chapter by Wood, if you have it. It’s a carefully reasoned look at the choices Hitchcock made, with an analysis that if not explaining away such “mistakes” as bad process shots, painted backdrops, and psychological inconsistencies, at least sees them in accord with the overall meaning or seeming ambition of the film’s psychological portrayal. The “third way,” however, is an interest in the director as a person behind a film. The tradition of quality blogger can like North by Northwest as a “well made film” that pleases the audience and was validated as good because people paid to see it [2] – essentially the vantage point of a producer or studio executive, a meddling busybody with snap judgments and easy dismissals, the Rex Reed school of thought. The academic is good at tracking meaning and similarities and progressions of a film though a director’s career as it interacts with the business, the public, and the earlier films, all valuable. The third way, however, asks for great sympathy for a director’s works, both as a whole and individually. So for example, a fan of Samuel Fuller or of Hitchcock and Marnie looks at the film not for its tradition of quality craft but for its expression of the director’s personality. The “sloppiness,” the extremes of quietude and loudness, the psychological flaws are interesting in themselves because they bespeak either passion (as in Fuller) or some kind of inner crisis we can never truly know, as possibly in the case of Hitchcock.[3]
It’s assumed that Hitchcock “identifies” with Mark Rutland, the Sean Connery character who takes an interest in the case of the mysterious, chilly secretary whom he identifies as the robber of one of his colleagues. Like other Hitchcock characters he “rescues” Marnie – although the ending of the film is ambiguous, even somewhat open ended, and anyway, there aren’t that many male rescuers in Hitchcock films outside of Grant in Notorious, women being usually in that position. What if in some strange way Hitchcock identified with Marnie? That Marnie and Marnie herself represent Hitchcock’s struggle with the terror of sex, and who, like Marnie, chose a life of “crime, making films that are usually about thieves, murderers, and spies? From a position such as this, one can “forgive” a director many a “mistake” or break from the prevailing definition of the well-made film, a definition that shifts from decade to decade or from new technology to new technology. The results are that Hitchcock’s movies, like Kubrick’s, often look better out of their time, than in them.
[1] It’s a reprint from the massive book A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.
[2] Hitchcock himself in interviews all too often took box office as validation over critical enthusiasm.
[3] By the way, until there is one other witness than Tippi Hedren to the alleged sexual harassment of which she charges him, I will remain dubious, as does Patrick McGilligan in his definitive bio of Hitchcock.
Originally posted at All Classical on 11 August 2015
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