Who said Marnie was the last Hitchcock classic?
Bad title card.
shareThat's what it was considered. Frenzy is just now being recognized as an underrated film. At the time, it was box office bomb.
Topaz, Family Plot, and Torn Curtain all failed with the audience and with the critics.
TORN CURTAIN was a huge hit. In fact, it became the highest grossing film in Universal Studios history, until that status was usurped the following year by THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. True, it was savaged by the critics but, with the passage of time, its virtues have become more appreciated. It has genuine suspense, is an admirable attempt to deal with the Cold War at a time when too many movies on that subject were relying on James Bond's "girls, guns and gadgets" formula to great success, and it features at least one sequence that stands with the best of Hitchcock's work across his entire career (those who've seen the film will know which sequence I am referring to), and Lila Kedrova shows up near the end to truly heartbreaking effect. I'd give it a B+ overall grade. What I disliked about the film is that it looks so cheaply made; the bus escape sequence is almost laughable because of the phoniness of the obvious and excessive rear-screen projection--and Hitchcock should have used the score that Bernard Herrmann wrote for the film instead of the more commercial one supplied by John Addison. Herrmann's score perfectly captures the chilly, bleak world of Communist East Berlin during the 1960s. Addison's score is entertaining and I like listening to it separate from the movie, but it lessens the overall impact of the work Hitchcock was trying to achieve. I have some trouble accepting Paul Newman as a nuclear physicist, but I think he works well with a vulnerable and unexpectedly sexy Julie Andrews.
MARNIE is not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, and a large part of that is because Tippi Hedren's performance is plain awful (the actress who played the important part of her mother was even worse). Hedrin was lovely to look at and possibly delightful to know, but she was a poor actress whose career nosedive had as much to do with herself as it did with Hitchcock, who is really treated with such outright disdain and disrespect in this piece of self-serving tripe that I was appalled.
Thank you, thank you--you're most kind. In fact you're every kind.
Everyone's got an opinion.
I consider "Marnie" to be a great film.
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No, you're wrong about FRENZY. It was a financial success and Hitchcock got the first consistently good reviews he'd received in a while. TORN CURTAIN did not do well, that's true, but none of the movies you mentioned lost money. And, to tell the truth, they continue to make money all these years after their initial release.
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