You can not go wrong with the Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock
- dvd title "Marnie." Tippi Hedren (The Birds) plays a good role
with Sean Connery - you will enjoy the pieces that leave a bit to
the imagination.
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Excellent
Added 9/26/2009
Hitchcock got a bad rap for Marnie. For some aspects of this film deservedly so. The sets are painfully fake--talk about old Hollywood, and Marnie's ending is mellowdramatic to a fault, almost comically so. Digging up repressed memories and having catharsis is old as the hills, and any therapist or person in therapy will tell you the quickness with which it happens here is ridiculous, even by 1964 standards.
Yet Marinie is artictically redeemed in many ways. The opening titles are done over Bernard Herman's jarring string music. Suddenly, the music stops, and Hitchcock cuts to a close up of Marnie's yellow pocketbook, then goes wide for a long shot of the railroad station she walks in. Hitchcock employs red color filters through the movie: you can tell from these moves he was expermenting, succssfully, with techniques young Europian modernists like Godard were then using. These add suprise to the film, and if the storytelling needs work, the adventurousness of Hitchcock here makes the film worth several viewings.
After the 1-2 horror punch of Psycho and The Byrds, the psychosexual bent of Marnie asks the viewer to make an incredable adjustment, particualarly when the execution is so soap operaesqe and painfully dated. Yet taken for what it is Marnie is visually stunning and the storyline is compelling enough to make you want to watch.
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Crime and Punishment...plus Sex...
Added 6/15/2009
Marni (Tippi Hedren) does the crime (grand theft), but wants nothing to do with marriage and/or sex. She is however, blackmailed into both by Mark (Sean Connery), a wealthy publisher, who discovers Marni's errants ways. Smitten, but puzzled by the extreme frigidity of the icy thief, he assumes, as naturally any man would, that the problem lies with his wife, not him. Well, in this case, he's right! Come on, folks! 'Tis the smoldering Sean Connery we are dealing with! And yet, Marni approaches the prospect of their wedding night with slightly less cheer then a year-long Gulag sentence might have inspired... The twisted events that follow lead to the neat solution of this psychological puzzle, but even then they do not guarantee a happy ending for the newly married.
Though the batteries supplying this odd couple with their on-screen electricity have yet to run out, the naive treatment of psychological disorders dates the 45 year old film significantly. However, once you allow yourself to overlook this shortcoming, you are rewarded with Hedren's supperb acting performance. It is a great shame that following her refusal to continue working for Hitchhock exclusively, ever possessive of his leading ladies, Hitchhock spitefully and succesfully blocked Hedren from the type of movie career this talented actress so deserved. The film is further noteworthy to any movie buff as the accepted start of decline in the quality of Hitchhock's work (still, it was judged more harshly by the director's contemporaries, then it is today).
And yet, as faulty as the technical crafstmanship of the film may have been, I was mesmerized by the on-screen chemistry between Connery and Hedren. I have re-watched "Marnie" numerous times with enjoyment and consider the DVD a worthy purchase...
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Loved the movie both lead characters are favorite of mine,its great to connect with them again.
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Even in a trauma we remain free
Added 2/6/2009
This film is extremely powerful because it centers on a woman who obviously has a problem, not an accident but a problem. We know very fast she is having many identities and that her main objective in the jobs she gets with her charm more than her references is to steal the cash from the firm's safe and leave. We understand she is taking care of a mother of hers with that money more than of herself. One man, one of his employers, officially the fifth one, will though go through the surface and discover who she really is, but he falls in love with her and, being a sort of anthropologist (zoologist is the word he uses, isn't it?) and psychologist, he is fascinated by her criminal personality and her fears and he decides to get her out of both. He has to bring her back to the trauma she lived when a small child and confront her with her own mother and the truth. And she is finally liberated from the fear caused by the absence of conscious memory of her crime at the time. I won't say more on the details. I am interested in the way Hitchcock builds his own case little by little and brings us to the point when the trauma can be relived and revealed. Yet I find his social psychology a little bit simple altogether. He only centers on the negative elements. He should have shown how ambiguous the girl must have been at the time with the two adults she was confronted to and with herself and her own act that made her accept her mother telling a lie to save her, because a child who has committed a crime understands very well when the adult covers his or her mistake and then the feelings are always ambiguous and it is that ambiguity that makes the child forget about the incident that becomes a trauma. The liberation is also absolutely too mechanical to be real. Yes there often is an illumination that is sudden but then the transformation of the traumatized individual is long because the trauma left a lot of traces, blocking elements or just gremlins in the head of the traumatized one. But Hitchcock does it very well. In 1964 he could only be inspired by Freud of whom he proposes a simplified reading, but today he would appear as a disciple of Ron L. Hubbard because dianetics is just what this film is, a mechanical and simplified version of psychoanalysis. That's another Hitchcock film from the 60s that has suffered some with the passing of time.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
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Reacquaint with "The Birds"
Added 11/20/2009
Hitchcock's 1963 drama/horror/thriller "The Birds" details the story of a city woman (Tippi Hedren) going to the rural coastal town Bodega Bay to play a coquettish prank on a lawyer whom she met in the city (Rod Taylor). As she starts to get to know the town the birds mysteriously attack in force.
"The Birds" might well be the first official nature-runs-amok flick, which were made hugely popular a dozen years later with the release of "Jaws," the film that opened the Pandora's box to creature-on-the-loose flicks.
I believe "The Birds" should be enjoyed at face value as a simple story of birds mysteriously attacking a coastal hamlet, but a more allegorical interpretation is that Melanie (Hedren) represents modern ideas (for 1963, that is) that attempt to infect the rural communities where people live and think in a simpler, more conservative way. The village is not ready to accept and incorporate these "new" concepts and so nature itself attempts to vomit out the infection, irregardless of hometown damage and casualties. Yet this interpretation seems to be rejected by the film itself in the restaurant scene where the mother with two kids hysterically rebukes Melanie for supposedly causing the bird attacks; when Melanie slaps the mother, this irrational notion is 'slapped' out of the viewer as well, as if to say, "That's stupid, Melanie is not the cause of this, whether literally or figuratively."
WHAT DOESN'T WORK:
- For the better part of an hour the story plays out as a slow drama, which will likely turn off those with ADHD. Personally, I find this approach refreshing in light of the frenetic editing and absurd action sequences of modern "blockbusters." Films like "The Birds" seem almost daring by comparison; in fact, it's startling. Besides, the beautiful Bodega Bay photography provides some nice backdrop eye-candy to help maintain one's attention with the soap operatics.
- One obvious plot hole is: Why do Melanie, the schoolmarm and the kids flee the schoolhouse? Wouldn't it be wiser to simply blockade themselves in an inner room with no windows? Or maybe there isn't such an interior room big enough to fit all the kids; after all, it appears to be a fairly small schoolhouse.
- Complaints about Melanie's supposedly lame prank on Mitch (Taylor) are nitpicking at best; and criticisms of Melanie foolishly searching for the source of a mysterious sound -- even though she must know what it is -- can easily be chalked up to curiosity killing the cat (for instance, while stopping by Point Pleasant, WV, on vacation in 2005 I went into an old abandoned building that used to be a home for troubled kids back in the day; my wife refused to go any where near the creepy domicile but I HAD to go in and look around; even the satanic graffiti and shocked birds flying out the windows didn't deter me!).
- After recently seeing films like the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" and "The Exorcism of Emily Rose", I can hardly find "The Birds" horrifying, although I certainly find it very entertaining. Really, the creepiest aspect of the movie is Mitch's hovering, suspicious mother, played by Jessica Tandy -- whoa, is she scary.
- The age difference of Mitch and his sister seems off. Taylor (Mitch) was 33 years-old during filming, although he looks to be more like 40 or older, but his sister in the story (Veronica Cartwright) was only 13. That's a twenty-year difference. I could see her being his daughter, but his sister? Also, if Veronica is 13 that means his creepy mother had sex a mere 13 years before -- and that's a really scary thought!
WHAT WORKS:
- As noted above, the slow dialogue-driven drama of the first hour is actually appealing in light of the modern glut of moronic cgi-laden, frenetically-edited drivel, not to mention the awesome coastal Northern California cinematography.
- Viewing the film is like going back in time to the early 60s. It's entertaining to see the clothing and decor styles, as well as social interactions, etc.
- Although I don't find Tippi sexy, I do enjoy her facial expressions. I know this is an odd comment, but she does have that Paul Stanley pouty lips rockstar expression down pat.
- Suzanne Pleshette's in the cast -- now SHE's sexy.
- There are numerous memorable and thrilling sequences -- the various bird attacks, the guy with no eye balls, the phone booth scene, etc. I also enjoyed the interesting discussion on birds in the diner sequence
- [END SPOILER!] I love the mysterious way the film ends with no explanation or dialogue. The sea of birds seem to permit their departure, even though the fowls could easily stop them if they wanted.
The film runs 2 hours.
GRADE: A-
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one of my 6 Hitch faves...(in no order)
Added 11/13/2009
1 THE BIRDS
2 NORTH BY NORTHWEST
3 PSYCHO
4 VERTIGO
5 MARNIE
6 LIFEBOAT
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STRANGELY Universal started releasing 2 disc SE titles from the 2005 restored Hitchcock box, then abruptly...stopped
PSYCHO
VERTIGO
THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY
REAR WINDOW (?) so far Maybe TORN CURTAIN and ROPE
MARNIE is from the 2005 MASTERPIECE SET, but before they decided to make them super deluxe standalone titles in 'book' form
LIFEBOAT was a shock to watch after viewing the MASTERPIECE SET-FOX should have been shamed into restoring it
I anxiously await THE BIRDS SE
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Wretched Hitchcock
Added 10/31/2009
Hitchcock made some good films, such as North by Northwest. But The Birds was not one of them (nor Psycho). Direction and writing are nigh nonexistent. Was Hitchcock on tranquilizers while doing this film? If not for the special effects crew this film would be wretched, as is sometimes the case in Hollywood (such as The Mist, another example of extraordinary special effects talent mismatched with horrid direction and writing). I know, saying Hitchcock made bad films is like saying Michelangelo couldn't sculpt or Shakespeare couldn't write. But that simply isn't the case.
The Birds is a drunken flop in all but special effects.
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