event Alfred Hitchcock Series: Marnie

After Alfred Hitchcock found a surprisingly sizable audience for his gonzo suspense films Psycho and The Birds, he spent a lot of his renewed commercial cachet on Marnie, a gamy psychological thriller with Tippi Hedren as a frigid kleptomaniac and Sean Connery as the amateur zoologist who blackmails her into marriage just so he can find out what makes her tick. After flopping in 1964, the film was considered an embarrassment for years even by Hitchcock fans, who blanched at its cynical portrait of marriage and the queasy near-rape scene at its center—the very qualities that now make Marnie one of the cornerstones of the filmmaker’s canon.