Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 1, January 2003
Bob Davis
Disciplining _Marnie_:
Tony Lee Moral's _Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie_
Tony Lee Moral _Hitchcock and the Making
of Marnie_ Manchester:
Manchester
University Press,
2002 ISBN 0719064821 215 pp. 'Never trust the artist,
trust the tale.' Though Tony Lee Moral
cites D. H. Lawrence's aphorism as a favorite of film
theorists, Moral himself, in his new book on _Marnie_,
credits neither teller nor tale. After quoting the director,
exaggerating to be sure, on his intentions -- 'content I am
not interested in at all. I don't give a damn about what the
film is about; I am more interested in *how* to handle the
material to create an emotion in the audience' (3, emphasis
added) -- Moral, sadly, eschews what one might hope for
given his book's title, a detailed technical analysis of the
'how' of Hitchcock's _Marnie_. Not without occasional
documentary value, the book instead too often reads like the
kind of 'in their own words' journalism typical of many
graduate theses or a slightly more gossipy and
controversy-mongering equivalent of those EPK-like 'making
of's one sometimes gets as 'extras' on DVD releases. Moral
spends four-plus pages, for example, rehashing Grace Kelly's
on-again off-again courtship with the title role, and
reviewing rumors concerning why the princess might return to
Hollywood, before presenting the 'real reasons' for her
ultimate departure from the picture. Lots of personal histories
and lots of hearsay, but surprisingly little interest in
checking that hearsay's claims against the evidence of the
film. Moral spends way more space detailing the likes of
novelist Winston Graham's vacation itinerary and his demands
about screen credit type size than he does, for example,
considering the lenses with which Robert Burks shot
_Marnie_. The writer includes a single sentence which
reports that Hitchcock's 'favorite lens was a 50mm, which he
said was the lens of the eye' (107). [1] But he has
not considered those moments in the film (for example, in
the flashback sequence) which indicate other focal lengths
were used. And consequently he has not asked whether lens
length was a part of Hitchcock's 'how', a part of his
handling of material to create emotions in the
audience. _Hitchcock and the Making
of Marnie_ is broken into eight chapters, plus an
Introduction and an Afterword. Half the chapters ('Genesis',
'Marketing', 'Critical Reception', 'Artistic
Interpretation') concern 'making' only under the loosest of
definitions. The Introduction is particularly misleading, in
that it announces Moral's objectives in a language -- that
of trendy academic quasi-psychoanalysis and leftist politics
-- situated at the end of the spectrum opposite Moral's
usual reportage. Here _Marnie_ reveals 'the underlying root
cause [sic, triply redundant] of the male domination
syndrome at work'; while, today, when 'the destructive
actions of patriarchal capitalism threatens [sic] to
destroy the planet and life as we know it . . . Hitchcock's
film deconstructs all that is abhorrent about a repressive
culture that rapes the environment and what is conceived to
be feminine' (xii). In his Introduction Moral
announces five objectives: 1. to demonstrate
_Marnie_'s current relevance as 'a ruthless examination of
gender expectations, which lead to violence within our
culture' (xii); 2. to suggest how _Marnie_
coheres, thematically, with other Hitchcock
films; 3. to highlight, in
contrast to auteurist views, _Marnie_'s
'multivocality'; 4. to refute claims
Hitchcock abandoned _Marnie_ in postproduction;
and 5. to view _Marnie_ as
part of Hitchcock's late career campaign to be taken
seriously as an artist. But these objectives don't
generate for Moral a method of attack or structure his book.
They function only as leitmotifs. And worse, the objectives
often seem at odds. The third objective is particularly
hollow. Not even the staunchest auteurist denies that
big-budget films are made by large casts and crews, each of
which contributes to the finished product. The issue is one
of degree. Moral's second objective (thematic coherence
across films) supports the auteurist line. And the many
anecdotes Moral relates regarding Hitchcock's obsession with
the details of performance, dress, language, and the casting
of animals, and indeed Moral's fourth objective itself -- 'I
will show that rather than the charge of neglect, it was
Hitchcock's predilection for total control that was the main
cause of events going awry' (xiii) -- suggest that Hitchcock
was firmly ensconced on the 'auteur' end of the
auteur/multivocality continuum. Writing
_Marnie_ Perhaps the most useful
chapter is the second, 'Writing'. Here Moral details the
contributions of the film's various scenarists: Joseph
Stefano, who had worked with Hitchcock on _Psycho_,
generated a 161-page treatment for _Marnie_ based on
Graham's novel; novelist Evan Hunter, who submitted a
189-page screenplay, complete with an alternate version of
the infamous honeymoon 'rape' scene; and playwright Jay
Presson Allen, who, working from a sequence synopsis of
Hunter's script, wrote her first movie. [2]
According to Moral,
Stefano was largely responsible for suggesting the fetishism
-- Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) wants to bed Marnie (Tippi
Hedren) *because* she is a thief -- that became, for the
director, the movie's raison d'etre, at least content-wise.
Hunter supplied three set pieces. In the first, Marnie
steals Susan's key which gives her access to the Rutland
vault's combination. Later Marnie, after robbing the safe,
evades a cleaning woman, despite dropping her shoe. And
finally, Hunter created a flashback scene in which Marnie
and the audience discover the truth about the sailor's
death. Hunter, in a letter to Hedren, that Moral sensibly
reprints (32-34), explains Marnie's psychosis in Oedipal
terms: Marnie succumbs to the sailor, thinking him her
father; the Mother, taking the sailor's friendliness as a
sexual advance, attacks and kills the father figure; and the
little girl's analysis of the situation is that 'my father
made love to me and my mother killed him for it' (33). This,
according to Hunter, helps explain Marnie's subsequent
behavior. Allen streamlined the scenario. She dropped the
scenes with Marnie's psychiatrist and transformed Mark into
an armchair zoologist, and thus a credible amateur
psychologist. Allen also replaced the novel's secondary male
love interest, Terry Holbrook, with Lil, a rival for Mark's
affections, thus preserving a typically Hitchcockian love
triangle. Moral presents all this
evidence chronologically, and because of that, and because
he's not working with anything even approximating a
scientific methodology for investigating script revision,
his history, though often insightful, seems
catch-as-catch-can. A careful redaction critical analysis
may have yielded interesting and more precise results.
Redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) [3] is a
method students of Classics and History of Religion have
employed to isolate the specific contributions of specific
authors to evolving literary traditions by analyzing the
editorial (redactional) techniques applied in reshaping
those traditions. Redaction critics note, mechanically at
first, all the additions, changes, and omissions made to and
from a source by a later redactor, then consider whether
these additions, changes, and omissions are systematic,
whether they evidence certain ideological, philosophical,
sociological, psychological, what-have-you
tendencies. In order to efficiently
compare a source and its redaction or, in this case,
redactions, the critic must first prepare a 'synopsis'
[4] of parallel materials, a side-by-side
organization of the source, and the redacted texts. To study
_Marnie_ for its redactional tendencies the critic would
therefore need, at least, copies of Graham's novel,
Stefano's treatment, Hunter's script, and Allen's script.
Photocopies of the source novel and all preproduction
treatments and screenplays would need to be reduced enough
to fit onto a very big sheet of paper's horizontal aspect
ratio. The copies would have to be cut so parallel materials
can be placed side-by-side. [5] The 'flow' of
redaction, then, becomes relatively easy to detect.
[6] Moral does some of this
kind of work intuitively. He's particularly keen to discuss
the evolution of the film's ending. But because he is
trapped in his chronological presentation, the analysis
never feels complete. According to Moral (47), Stefano's
treatment ends when Mark and Marnie arrive in Baltimore to
find Marnie's mother (called Jessie at this stage in the
movie's development) has died. A love scene between Marnie
and Mark follows but is interrupted by the arrival of the
police, who cart Marnie away, Mark cornily promising to wait
for her. Hunter keeps the post-mortem setting but has Marnie
sift through her mother's trunk and find an old newspaper
clipping reporting the sailor's death. Lucy Nye appears to
tell the story. An oedipal flashback culminates in Marnie's
mother's thwacking the sailor with an iron poker. Allen's
script revives the mother (now Bernice), reworks the
flashback so that little Marnie herself wields the lethal
poker, and creates the speech in which Bernice explains how
she 'got' Marnie. A redaction critic might
then ask a number of questions. Are there any parallel
scenes in Graham's novel, and if there aren't does Stefano's
creating a scene with a dead mother suggest any
psychologically motivated tendency on his part? Does
Stefano's redaction (or creation ex nihilo) of this scene
cohere with his tendencies in other scenes? Does Stefano's
inclusion of a love scene have precursors in Graham's novel?
If not, does the love scene function as a continuation or
dramatic resolution of thematic tendencies Stefano
previously emphasized or introduced? How does Lucy Nye
function in Hunter's screenplay? Does her character evidence
any coherent tendency on Hunter's part? Does the survival of
Marnie's mother in Allen's script represent a tendency? Why
did Allen have Marnie, and not her mother, kill the sailor?
What becomes of Hunter's emphasis on Marnie's 'oedipal
complex' in Allen's revised murder scene? Does Allen
consistently eliminate Hunter's 'oedipal' clues? What was
Hitchcock's role in the development of this scene? Etc.,
etc. Moral suggests that the
evidence he presents in Chapter 2 most strongly supports his
view of _Marnie_'s 'multivocality' (objective 3). But even
here, Hitchcock's control seems apparent. Hunter certainly
understood that the director's was the final word. The
novelist-turned-screenwriter was fired, he believes, for not
conforming to Hitchcock's vision of the honeymoon rape
scene. Allen seems to have known better. Moral reports that,
in her script, the rape scene 'is very specific in camera
direction, suggesting that Hitchcock led his writer through
the choreography' (45). Indeed, the filmed sequence reflects
the script in detail. Hitchcock himself, during the months
before he released Hunter, praised his writer in a most
unusual way. 'He's genial enough', Hitchcock claimed, 'to
accept my suggestions and, if I may say so, they are only
suggestions . . . that cannot be changed' (27). Filming
_Marnie_ The most disappointing
chapters are those in which production (chapter 4) and
editing (chapter 5) attract Moral's attention. Moral's
journalistic sensibilities lead him to spend four of chapter
4's mere 28 pages on _Marnie_'s rear projections and painted
backdrops, not because they provide any special insight into
Hitchcock's power as a filmmaker, but principally, it seems,
because these filmic anachronisms caused a 'furor' among
popular critics when _Marnie_ was released (120). Similarly,
another four pages are wasted on the 'troubled relations'
between Hitchcock and Hedren -- Hedren planned to marry her
agent, against Hitchcock's will. For Moral, these amounted
to 'the greatest *controversy* surrounding the production of
_Marnie_' (121, emphasis added). Moral hints at, then
drops, potentially fruitful topics. 'We've always had
problems with writers', Hitchcock suggests, 'because I find
that I am teaching them cinematics all the time. You see,
you've got to remember a lot of writers have to go by the
page, and what is written on the page. I have no interest in
that. I only have that square white rectangle to fill. With
a succession of images -- one following another. Size of
image . . . that's what makes a film' (21). But analysis of
image size and how it contributes to building viewer emotion
is never considered in Moral's book. Art director Robert Boyle
cues the importance of what he calls Hitchcock's 'subjective
treatment' (106) and the director's extensive use of
point-of-view shots. 'He'll go into a close-up, and then
you'll see what that person sees. It may be a moving point
of view . . . Hitchcock, in my experience, understands the
subjective point of view and uses it better than any
director that I know' (77). But clues to Hitchcock's
filmmaking power like this one remain unpacked. Moral
provides no analysis of POV in _Marnie_. The topic is
recalled only obliquely in chapter 7, Critical Reception, in
connection with Laura Mulvey's and Raymond Bellour's ideas
about fetishism and 'the male gaze', but since Moral hasn't
rigorously investigated how Hitchcock 'made' _Marnie_, he
can provide no critique of those theories.
[7] Though Moral sometimes
provides the tantalizing tidbit (for example, underdeveloped
descriptions of deleted scenes, or Hitchcock's interest in
zero degree acting and the Kuleshov effect), missed
opportunities and puzzling omissions abound. Moral has dug
up and appropriately prints (133-134) a list of eight
'notes' Allen gave Hitchcock and his editor, George
Tomasini, after viewing a rough cut of the film. But,
strangely, Moral doesn't even bother to record whether any
or all of Allen's suggestions were implemented! Allen's
eighth note, to take just one example, follows: '8. Exterior Mark's
bedroom [sic] -- return from honeymoon -- After she
shuts the door in his face, the line 'You don't have to lock
the door, Marnie. Believe me.' Should be reinstated at
whatever costs and his smile -- all of it -- should be cut.'
(134) Moral fails to note that
Hitchcock and Tomasini do not, in fact, reinstate the
missing line, but they do eliminate the smile by dissolving
to the next scene as soon as Marnie has shut the door in
Mark's face. This visual, and thus more Hitchcockian end to
the scene -- Allen's dialogue was redundant -- results in
the audience's sympathizing with the shunned Mark. It
manipulates the audience's emotions. It is part of
Hitchcock's 'how'. [8] It's particularly ironic
that Moral ends his book with a quote from Hitchcock which
could have (should have, perhaps) been the focal point of
_Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie_. The year after he
completed _Marnie_, the director received the 1965
Producer's Guild Award. With typical precision and clarity,
he summarized his art: 'There is one impression
with which I wish to leave you, and I want it to be
unmistakable. It is this: that the recipient of this award
aims to create emotion in an audience, not through subject
matter, but through technique . . . He is not interested in
making a film that is merely photographs of people talking,
but strives always to tell his stories in a way that no
other medium can -- in strictly cinematic terms.'
(203) California State
University Fullerton, California,
USA Notes 1. Moral follows this line
with a longish quote from AD James Brown, a gee-whiz-wow
anecdote about how Hitchcock was able to correctly identify
a shot's image size by noting the distance between camera
and subject. 2. There's still a fair
amount of unintegrated biographical faff here. We learn how
much each writer was paid, where he or she stayed while in
Southern California, and even which brand of typewriter
(1949 Underwood) Miss Allen used. 3. Norman Perrin, _What Is
Redaction Criticism?_ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969),
provides a standard introduction. 4. 'Synopsis' is Greek for
'viewed together'. Published examples of synopses include
Albert Huck and Heinrich Greeven, _Synopse der drei ersten
Evangelien_, 13th edition (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1981), a
synopsis of the first three gospels' Greek texts, with
critical apparatus. 5. In addition to the four
parallel columns (novel, treatment, and two screenplays)
room for two more columns -- for a, notes derived from
Hitchcock's preproduction conferences which Moral often
quotes, and b, a transcript of the finished film -- would
facilitate a more rigorous analysis which includes
Hitchcock's own redactional efforts. 6. Together with a group
of graduate students and advanced undergraduates at
California State University, I have created synopses of the
Burgess-Kubrick _A Clockwork Orange_ and the
James-Raphael-Bogdanovich _Daisy Miller_. A
Grubb-Agee-Laughton _Night of the Hunter_ is
forthcoming. 7. Even a cursory look at
_Marnie_ shows numerous shots taken from the POV of Marnie,
as well as Mark's. And Lil, Bernice, and even the sailor
Marnie kills, all of them 'gaze'. 8. Similarly, color design
is treated from the standpoint of preproduction anecdotes
(65). No analysis of what's actually in the film is
undertaken in order to test the veracity of that oral
history. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004. Bob Davis, 'Disciplining
_Marnie_: Tony Lee Moral's _Hitchcock and the Making of
Marnie_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 1, January 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n1davis>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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