As Tony Lee Moral reports in his book “Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie,” Alfred Hitchcock saw Tippi Hedren in late 1961 in a commercial that ran during the “Today” show, cast her in the lead role in “The Birds,” and then offered her the title role in “Marnie” (which I discuss in the clip above) when his first choice for the part—Grace Kelly, who hadn’t acted in a movie since her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco, in 1956—turned it down. I think Hitchcock was lucky; Kelly may have been a more graceful actress, but Hedren is by far the more unusual presence, and her cold, mask-like representation of repressed agony and denial of pleasure is the most precise and extreme expression of the obsessions of the most obsessive of directors.
Here’s how Hitchcock described Hedren as he was making “The Birds”:
Hitchcock did everything he could do, while working with Hedren, to discover her sex at first hand. Interviewed in 1999 by Anita Chaudhuri of the Guardian, Hedren said that he was “sexually obsessed” with her and put undue pressure on her, which she resisted at the cost of their relationship, personal and professional. The screenwriter Jay Presson Allen told Chaudhuri, “I was agonisingly unhappy for both of them. It was an old man’s cri de coeur…. She had her own life and everyone was telling her not to make Hitch unhappy. But she couldn’t help making him unhappy. By the end of the film he was very angry with her.”
“Marnie” is a movie of violent passion that contains an appalling rape scene; the essential subject of the movie is control—the control that a man exerts over an unwilling woman to “cure” her of her resistance to pleasure (that is, to pleasure with him and for him). It’s a disturbing, painfully personal movie; its images have a sleek, glossy, sharp-edged clarity that contain, but can’t conceal, Hitchcock’s eruptive, vehement, anguished, and frustrated passion.
