Archive: Book Reviews, May 2004
Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie
By Tony Lee Moral
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7190-6482-1. xvi + 215pp
A Review by Liza J. Palmer, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) has enjoyed a varied reception in the nearly forty years since its release. Considered by contemporary critics to be a disappointment after the unqualified successes of North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), Marnie resulted in mediocre box office returns -- particularly in the United States -- and was thought to be the beginning of the end of Hitchcock's impressive career trajectory. Subsequent to release, however, the film experienced a series of resurrections -- first, at the hands of the Cahiers critics during the flowering of the auteur theory in the 1960s; and, second, in the 1970s, when film scholarship turned towards psychoanalysis and semiotics, under the auspices of such theorists as Laura Mulvey and Raymond Bellour. Indeed, it would seem that Marnie's distinctive, yet always transparent style served to satisfy easily any scholar's theoretical agenda. Whether it has been loved or hated, though, Marnie is a film that has never strayed far from the critical consciousness of cinema -- a variant of success, to be sure.
Recent considerations of Marnie have been more kind -- and perhaps more grounded in textual and stylistic analysis as opposed to abstract interpretation -- with Marnie now often identified by critics and filmmakers as, if nothing else, an influential and interesting failure. Tony Lee Moral, with his new work Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, joins this cadre of scholars determined to discover the pearl amongst the rough, arguing quite persuasively the importance of Marnie both as a Hitchcock text and as a film whose sophisticated subject matter, well before its time, still resonates with the issues and themes of today's society.
Moral has constructed an accessible, well-researched case study of a Hollywood film from source material to finished product. Regardless of whether the film Marnie is of interest to the reader, the structure of the book and its clear delineation of the commercial filmmaking process for a single film at the end of the studio system are reasons enough to value this book. In fact, such a work as this would be instructive – and illuminating – reading for any student engaged in an introduction to film course.
But, fortunately enough, the making of Marnie and the film itself are of great interest to the reader, thanks to Moral's thorough research and organized approach. He has consulted a number of primary resources -- most notably Hitchcock's files at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and at the Alfred J. Hitchcock Trust -- and has conducted numerous interviews with the principal participants from all aspects of the production, including Tippi Hedren, Sean Connery, Winston Graham, Joseph Stefano, and Jay Presson Allen. Moral shapes his investigation of Marnie across eight, straightforward and self-contained chapters: Genesis, Writing, Pre-production, Filming, Post-production, Marketing, Critical Reception, and Artistic Interpretation. Such organization allows for easy reference and extraction, as each chapter stands alone as a coherent part of the whole. Perhaps Moral's unique background in Zoology accounts for his excellent structure and description; but more film books should be as pointed and taut in their analysis and argumentation.
There are some weaknesses here, though they do not discredit Moral's work -- they are merely minor annoyances which, at worst, point to a certain naïveté on his part as far as film studies is concerned. Moral is very specific in the stating of his thesis; in the introduction, he lists five "objectives," which function more as feeble justifications for why he would possibly want to devote so much attention to the production of so contested a film text as Marnie. And because he seems so sensitive and preemptively defensive on this point, Moral tends to overreach, attempting to support arguments that are too ambitious for or wholly irrelevant to the scope of his work, for instance Marnie's importance to modern audiences "because it addresses deeply human problems" (xii). Such an assertion only serves to distill the impact of Moral's predominantly historical investigation. Too few books simply and accurately detail the production history of films; that alone is reason enough for a study like Moral's.
Moreover, Moral's casual use of such phrases as "spectacle of the male gaze" (68) when discussing the minutiae of Marnie's wardrobe belies his privileging of psychology at the expense of film style and grammar, an unfortunate tendency in current film writing. While such approaches to the study of film are valid in their proper place, it is imprecise to invoke such loaded terminology as if it were uncontested and accepted.
Lack of context also serves to weaken Moral's project. He is so focused on Marnie and its various creators that he sometimes fails to provide a more general sense of filmmaking practice at the end of the studio system. Those readers unaware of American commercial filmmaking at that time will have little understanding of how Marnie's process compared to the average classical Hollywood production of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, we are rarely given any clue as to how it even compared with Hitchcock's other films. Such contextual omissions are most glaring when Moral describes Marnie's writing process. A total of four very different writers worked successively on the script with Hitchcock; yet the significance of this fact is hardly explored either in relation to Marnie or to other films. Along these same lines, Moral sometimes does not know when to end a quote or else fails to underscore the importance of the speaker's words with his own commentary, effectively allowing the speaker's point to get lost in a tangent.
Another missed opportunity by Moral is his failure to adequately address the two storyboard sequences from Marnie included with this text. Such supplemental material, while hardly rare in a book on Hitchcock, is distinctive nonetheless, given their pertinence to the production. Moral sadly interacts with them briefly. More analysis is certainly warranted of an aspect so crucial to Hitchcock's style of direction.
However, when Moral is not leaping to untenable or outrageous conclusions as justification for his project, his book is a superior work of production history, reasonable in scope and supported by ample evidence, both textual and otherwise. Ultimately, Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie is an engaging -- and sorely needed -- case study of how a film is made, and will satisfy students of cinema and scholars of Hitchcock alike.