Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie celebrates its 60th anniversary this month. It was released in the US on July 22nd 1964 in New York and also in the UK on July 9th 1964, buoyed by the presence of international star Sean Connery who was garnering great reviews in the James Bond series. Sixty years on how has Marnie fared? As Mark Rutland would say, surprisingly well “Old Girl”.

Marnie has become a time capsule for gender representations, and psychoanalytical ideas of key traumas and events. The power of Hitchcock within the medium of cinema, is his ability to create iconic characters who remain indelible in our culture, like murdering psychopaths played by Robert Walker and Anthony Perkins, or ice heroines personified by Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. Furthermore, Hitchcock’s ability to create alternative realities within familiar settings, such as the haunting, urban landscape of San Francisco, or the imposing, granite faces of Mount Rushmore, remain in our consciousness as a world existing somewhere between reality and illusion. In Marnie, such images are represented by the shooting of the horse Forio, and the infamous Baltimore backdrop of the looming ship. The fact that these images linger long after we have seen the film, and have been influential to a vast array of other artists, is testimony to Hitchcock’s power as a film maker.

Hitchcock’s very popularity has made him a continual source of fascination for critical writing, from Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s to Lacanian champion Slavoj Zizek, who himself observes: “Hitchcock as the theoretical phenomenon that we have witnessed in recent decades – the endless flow of books, articles, university courses, conference panels, is a ‘postmodern’ phenomenon par excellence.”  What makes Hitchcock’s work so enduringly and eminently accessible, is the presentation of fundamentally significant human issues in an entertaining and provoking manner. Hitchcock’s films have captured the realm of popular imagination, suffused our culture and continue to remain an engaging critique of male and female sexual relationships. A panel of top directors including Martin Scorsese, Atom Egoyan and Bruce Robinson, assembled by the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine, voted for the ten greatest Hitchcock works. They chose; 1. Psycho, 2. Vertigo, 3. Notorious, 4. The Birds, 5. North by Northwest, 6. Shadow of a Doubt, 7. Foreign Correspondent, 8. Frenzy, 9. The Lady Vanishes and 10. Marnie.

A film that was universally scorned when first released, Marnie has grown tremendously in popularity and has now become a time capsule for gender representations and psychoanalytical ideas for key traumas and events. The film may well be Hitchcock’s testament in which his signature is left on every shot. The fact that these images linger long after we have seen the film, and have been influential to a vast array of other artists, is testimony to Hitchcock’s power as a film maker.

You can read about the making of the film in “Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie” published by Rowman and Littlefield who are offering a 30% discount with the code RLFANDF30 through this link https://rowman.com/…/Hitchcock-and-the-Making-of-Marnie… #hitchcock #marnie

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https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810891081/Hitchcock-and-the-Making-of-Marnie-Revised-Edition