I’m not one to dismiss out of hand the great Robin Wood’s opinion on any Hitchcock film, (even though he did promote the ludicrous “Hitchcock the homophobe” cliché late in life), but his bizarre respect for Marnie is hard to share no matter how hard one tries. Yes, the exposed artificiality of Marnie is fascinating and meaningful, but it is not enough to paper over the simple fact that any casual viewer can detect the tremendous drop in quality from The Birds to Marnie. Where one feels the creative juices flowing so potently in North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds - all of which, in radically different ways, manage to recruit the viewer into Hitchcock’s passion for cinema and experimentation - Marnie, for the first time, gives off a feeling of weariness and a dull plea to forgive its shortcomings if only out of respect for its creator’s legacy. It’s a feeling that would permeate all of Hitchcock’s later films except for Frenzy, and it’s never a pleasant sensation for those of us who know him to be one of the finest practitioners of the art form who ever lived. The fault does not lie with Tippi Hedren, who by all accounts was a trooper in the face of some merciless treatment at the hands of her director. She is admittedly weak in the title role, however, and it was Hitchcock’s obligation to do something about her complete lack of chemistry with her costars, the camera and Hitchcock himself. Instead, he decided to plough through against all better judgment, believing himself to possess the magic touch. Having once made a career-threatening flop starring Ingrid Bergman (Under Capricorn), he should have been mindful that success was never guaranteed. This fatal decision had other consequences too, with Marnie marking the last time he would work with several of his most essential collaborators - cinematographer Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini, and composer Bernard Herrmann - who had all helped to create the uninterrupted string of masterworks that Hitchcock had directed throughout the previous decade.
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