Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Marnie

Marnie Edgar: Tippi Hedren
Mark Rutland: Sean Connery
Sidney Strutt: Martin Gabel
Bernice Edgar: Louise Latham
Lil Mainwaring: Diane Baker
Mr. Rutland: Alan Napier
Susan Clabon: Mariette Hartley
Sailor: Bruce Dern

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Marnie, once dismissed as just a stew of melodrama and pop psychology, has undergone a wholesale re-evaluation in recent years, much of it spurred by revelations about Alfred Hitchcock's sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren. Now it's often seen as not only one of his most revealing films about his personal obsessions -- second perhaps only to Vertigo (1958), which it much resembles -- but also one of his greatest. Its champions include the New Yorker's Richard Brody and filmmaker Alexandre Philippe. In the introduction to a recent showing of Marnie on Turner Classic Movies, Philippe even compared Hedren's performance to that of Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001). I wouldn't go that far. In fact, the most I'm willing to say is that Marnie is a very odd duck of a movie, one that just thinking about for a while can give me the creeps, especially in these times when each day seems to bring a new revelation about powerful men and their treatment of vulnerable women (and men). That's why the key to Marnie seems to me not so much Marnie herself but Mark Rutland. Hedren is very good in her role, fully playing up her character's ever-present self-consciousness, born of being the constant object of the male gaze. But the film turns on an actor's ability to make Mark's obsession with Marnie, his persistence in trying to treat her disorder, and the breakdown of his endurance when he rapes her into something both credible and meaningful. I doubt that even Hitchcock's most gifted leading men, i.e., Cary Grant and James Stewart, could have brought off the role with much success. Sean Connery brings his Bondian smirk to the part, which heightens our sense of Marnie's fear of men, but also undercuts what should be at least a plausible interest on his part of treating her illness. There's no gentleness in Connery's performance, so that even Mark's attempts to win her over -- buying her beloved horse, for example -- look like power plays. But Marnie's response to Mark is equally perverse: After the rape, she tries to drown herself in the ship's swimming pool, and when he asks why she didn't just jump overboard, she replies, "The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish." Not only is the reply nonsensical but it also underscores the truth: The idea was obviously to let herself be found, either to be rescued or by her death to score another point against men. So it's clear that Marnie is the kind of film that invites exhaustive comment, which is not exactly the same thing as saying it's a great film, or even a good one. To my mind, it's a showcase of Hitchcockian technique without heart or wit. It has some fine touches, such as the scene in which Marnie goes to rob the Rutland safe and we watch as she goes about it on one side of the screen while on the other a cleaning woman comes closer and closer to discovering her. Once again, Hitchcock makes us root for someone who's doing something we should disapprove of, but there's also something overfamiliar about it: We saw something like it in Psycho (1960), when Norman tries and almost fails to sink the Ford containing Marion's body in the swamp. But there it was an important alienating moment; here it just seems like a trick to build suspense in a film that doesn't particularly need it. It's style for style's sake, the essence of decadence, and Marnie may be Hitchcock's most decadent film.

Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)

Barbara Harris, as the "spiritualist" Blanche Tyler, is the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock's last movie. According to Stephen Whitty's  The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, Hitchcock wanted Harris for the role, but he met resistance from the studio, which wanted a bigger name, so he cast Karen Black in the slightly lesser role of Fran to please the higher-ups, who gave Black higher billing than Harris. Which brings up an old question: Why did Harris never become a major star? She made an impressive movie debut in A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965), was a standout in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), and received an Oscar nomination for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (Ulu Grosbard, 1971), but is pretty much forgotten today. She may just be a case of the right talent having been born at the wrong time: Harris had just turned 40 when she made Family Plot. If she had been born a decade later, she might have given Goldie Hawn or, even later, Meg Ryan competition for the romantic comedy roles they became famous for. Family Plot is feather-light lesser Hitchcock, though on the whole it's a return to form for the director after the rather grim Frenzy (1972) and the late misfires Topaz (1969) and Torn Curtain (1967). There are some touches of the master director to be seen in it. The film makes us think that its main story is that of Blanche and her boyfriend George Lumley (Bruce Dern) as they try to track down the missing heir to a fortune, but as Blanche and George are riding in his cab arguing, he suddenly slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a woman crossing the street. The camera takes a sharp left turn and follows the woman instead, taking us into a plot about jewel thieves. The setup is in Ernest Lehman's screenplay, but Hitchcock is classically artful in the way he keeps both plots dangling until we can see how they intersect. There's another glimpse of the master at work in the way he films George trying to meet up with a woman he's trying to question. The scene takes place in a cemetery, and Hitchcock films it with an overhead camera so that we can see the crossing paths among the graves as George maneuvers his way toward the woman. I doubt that Hitchcock ever played one, but the sequence reminds me of a video game maze. Harris, Black, and Dern are all good in their roles, and William Devane is a fine villain. (Though have there ever been toothier leading men than Dern and Devane?) John Williams adds a touch of Bernard Herrmann in some parts of his score, the only one he did for Hitchcock.

The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)

The title, The Hateful Eight, is pretty clearly an homage of sorts to such films as The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967), and even The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969).  And it's well to remember how all of those films were once criticized for excessive violence and The Wild Bunch was once threatened with an NC-17 rating. None of them contained anything like the violence of The Hateful Eight, which is visited on all of the characters, but most memorably on the one woman among the eight: Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is subjected to torrents of blood, vomit, and blown-out brains along with repeated blows to the face and a final drawn-out hanging. Writer-director Quentin Tarantino and his defenders excuse the excess of violence by arguing that his cinematic violence is a metaphor for racial and sexual violence in America and an expression of the revenge mentality that undermines the due administration of justice. As Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth) argues in the film, "dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice." That Mobray is using this argument to forestall any actual dispassionate justice meted out to him only reinforces its irony -- a kind of postmodern irony that some will argue tends to lead us into spirals of self-defeat. That's why Tarantino's films often feel so nihilistic, despite their wit and technical prowess. At more than three hours, The Hateful Eight is about an hour too long, which I think is a fatal flaw, considering that the suspense lags as the slow revelation of its plot twists emerges. The wait for the eruptions of violence that we know are coming produces a kind of prurience, but there is no cathartic release when they arrive. The movie is well-acted by Leigh, Roth, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Bruce Dern, and Michael Madsen as the eight, and Channing Tatum gives a remarkable performance in his late surprise appearance. The music by Ennio Morricone won a well-deserved, long overdue Oscar, and the cinematography by Robert Richardson makes the most of the shift from spectacular mountain scenery to the claustrophobic setting of the major part of the film. But Tarantino has settled into predictability, and I want him to show us something new.