Marnie (1964)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Marnie is a beautiful but emotionally withdrawn thief, stealing from employers before disappearing under new identities. When her new boss, Mark Rutland, discovers her secret, his fascination turns to obsession, and he blackmails her into marriage, convinced he can cure her. But as he probes deeper into Marnie’s fractured mind, long-buried fears and compulsions begin to surface.
11 connections found
View:
11 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Marnie to
This young woman initially appears like an icy siren straight out of a Hitchcock classic like Vertigo or Marnie, her haunted yet hopeful facial features so innocently beguiling it’s understandable how a driven, narcissistic workaholic like Reynolds could be so instantly enamored with her.
With Anderson’s woozily beautiful cinematography and melancholy, chilly, swoony Bernard Herrmann-esque strings courtesy of a fabulous score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread resonates with images, moods, textures and themes that evoke the darkest romances of Alfred Hitchcock– Suspicion , Vertigo and Marnie spring to mind.
Hitchcock’s influences are deeply felt here in particular, with Alma and Reynolds’ difficult, strained romance smacking of films like Rebecca and Marnie .
As I say in my video review above, the inspiration for Anderson (diving into British cinema this time around and bringing Day-Lewis back from his carpetbagging American roles of recent years along with him) is Hitchcock, with more than a touch of Rebecca and even a splash of Marnie and definitely Vertigo .
Mr. Lynch's women also hark back to the perfectly coiffed blond heroines of Alfred Hitchcock's ''Vertigo'' and ''Marnie,'' while the music of Angelo Badalamenti, his favorite composer, is a Mannerist echo of Hitchcock's musical main man, Bernard Herrmann.
But its greatest descendant is David Lynch 's Mulholland Drive , another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.
It’s Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) that Biller cites, along with the Italian giallo thrillers of the ’70s and New Wave Euro art-house films, as her main inspiration for this lovingly crafted homage.
The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of Marnie that Park evokes.
Advertisement
You could make a season of films like that, and it would have to include Griffith and Lillian Gish (Broken Blossoms); von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich (Morocco, The Devil is a Woman); Antonioni and Monica Vitti (L’Avventura); Hawks and Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not); Capra and Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman, The Bitter Tea of General Yen); Godard and Anna Karina (Vivre Sa Vie, Pierrot le Fou); Ingmar Bergman and nearly every actress he worked with (Persona, Cries and Whispers, Summer with Monika); Hitchcock and Grace Kelly (Rear Window), and Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie); and Truffaut and Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim) and Truffaut and Catherine Deneuve (Mississippi Mermaid).
This would be beside the point had not Panic Room evidently aspired to be a parable of rape through the violation of a feminine sanctuary--something along the lines of Marnie perhaps, or more accurately of the Manderly arc of Rebecca--and an indictment of the audience's perverse anticipation of the character's suffering.
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos fits De Palmas need for tawdry nudity while perhaps aspiring to the heights of Hedren's acting in "Marnie."
Griffith is the daughter of Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie), so the connection to Hitchcock is again unavoidable, even though Hitch's protagonists in Vertigo and Rear Window (played by Jimmy Stewart) certainly never encountered a girl like Holly Body.
Advertisement
Presumably, De Palma hired Griffith for the opportunity to make explicit the sexual trauma and suppression in Hedren’s appearances in Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marnie.
As was the case with Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo,’’ Anthony Perkins in “Psycho,’’ and Tippi Hedren in “Marnie,’’ the more crucial matter is Teddy’s increasingly unsteady state of mind.