Alfred Hitchcock: Arte shows “Marnie” with Sean Connery

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Sean Connery can also be nasty: Arte shows Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie”

Alfred Hitchcock is always worth seeing. Arte is showing a film from his late work on Sunday evening: In “Marnie”, James Bond actor Sean Connery is not gentlemanly at all.

No matter how many times you’ve seen it, seeing an Alfred Hitchcock film again is always worthwhile. Because the “Master of Suspense” is never about looking forward to a resolution for 90 minutes. Rather, the master plays with the viewers throughout the film. He manipulates like crazy. And the staging of his female heroes was also a game for Hitch – which turned out to be increasingly unfavorable for the actresses over the course of his life.

While in the 1940s and 1950s he looked at stars like Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly with an amorous gaze and staged them as cool goddesses on the screen, from the 1960s at the latest, women were primarily assigned the role of victim. In “Psycho” (1960) Janet Leigh was brutally stabbed after a third of the film. During the shooting of “The Birds” the director abused his leading actress Tippi Hedren and exposed her to live bird attacks for a week – until she suffered a nervous breakdown.

Alfred Hitchcock and his obsessions

In 1964 he lets Hedren in “Marnie”, the story of a kleptomaniac, raped by her husband on her honeymoon – played by Sean Connery of all people, who had become a radiant cinema hero through the first two James Bond films. Such a violent scene was unusual – even for Hitchcock. His sexual obsessions – and arguably frustrations as well – flowed more and more obviously into his late films.

The film is heavy stuff, and despite the unusually violent scenes for the time, it’s fascinating to watch Hitchcock channel his negative energies and turn them into great art. With “Marnie” – as before with “Psycho” and “I’m fighting for you” – psychological theories flow in. It is also interesting to see how Hitchcock breaks a film hero like Connery with positive connotations and thereby gives him new facets. If you want to find out more about the actor: Directly after “Marnie”, Arte will be showing the 60-minute documentary “Sean Connery vs James Bond” from 10:20 p.m.

Arte is showing “Marnie” on Sunday, October 30 at 8:15 p.m.

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