The Trouble with Marnie

This is the feature-length documentary on the DVD of Marnie, and note that it spoils the film. It consists of interviews, clips of the film and stills/covers from this and other of Alfred's movies. There is clear(and deserved; always nice when that is the case) love-fest in this, but it also goes into things that were meant to have been different, and might have even improved the final product, in spite of it already being excellent. It was originally meant to have a male co-worker(he became Lil) with whom Mark would compete for Marnie's affections, and a therapist. They go into the rape scene, and how the first writer was fired for trying to cut it. In general, this is very interesting, and they cover most of what we'd wanna know. It is lacking any involvement from Connery(I understand that he is a private man), and this doesn't go into the well-known falling out between Hedren and Hitchcock. Tippi could have told us her version; that would really have added to this. Still, a very informative 58 and a half minutes. There is disturbing content and blood in this. I recommend this to every fan of the picture itself. 8/10

"The Trouble with Marnie" is a very informative and interesting documentary, it is of a substantial length and emerges (along with "The Making of Psycho" and "All about the Birds") as one of the better featurettes in the Hitchcock Collection.

All the interviews are fascinating to watch, and being a Tippi Hedren fan, it is a real treat to watch her talk about her filming experiences. Jay Presson Allen and Evan Hunter also made interesting contributions to the documentary and it was quite a surprise to hear about Evan and Hitchcock's dispute over the "rape" scene. It was also a treat to hear from Louise Latham and Diane Baker, I always find it far more interesting listening to people actually involved in the production and acting of the film as appose to Film Historians and Biographers (but we do hear from afew of them as well).

However, and that's a big "however" seen as I must nit-pick at this thing, I have two great disappointments with it. Firstly the lack of Sean Connery is very frustrating as we all know he is alive and well and could (and should) contribute to such documentaries. But then he is a very private man and, as far as I know, doesn't care much for giving interviews. But I feel that with his participation my mind would be taken off my other much much bigger disappointment with the documentary. That is it deals with none of the controversy that arose between Hedren and Hitchcock during the production. It is well known that the pair had a major fall out during the making of the film but I've never heard it straight from Hedren herself. It is a great disappointment as she is right there sitting, yet she says nothing about the subject. Now this could be due to two reasons, either Tippi Hedren does not want to talk about the matter, or (and i think this is much more likely) being a Laurent Bouzereau documentary, it is relatively controversy free. This really irritates me about Laurent Bouzereau his featurettes are always good and entertaining but they could be so much better with just that little bit more. There's never any talk of major arguments, its basically always people talking about how much they thought Hitch was brilliant and how everybody was great and everyone had a great time, well it is well documented that not everyone did have a great time filming Marnie! Just some disappointments stop this documentary from being brilliant, but it is still a worthy watch.