Bond On Blonde
Tippi Hedren stars as Marnie Edgar, a compulsive thief who has taken clerical jobs from Baltimore to Buffalo, only to bide her time for a few weeks and then loot the safe. But when she turns up in Philadelphia at Rutland Insurance, company man Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) discovers her pattern of theft and then threatens to expose her unless she marries him. Far from a marriage of convenience, playboy Mark, who loves a challenge, sees Marnie as a sort of wild animal that he has trapped and intends to tame, while his new bride struggles with various deep-seated psychological problems — including a fear of thunderstorms and sexual frigidity — that indicate a traumatic event in her past. Before long, Mark becomes fascinated with Marnie's emotional dilemmas, which he intends to pinpoint and perhaps cure. Marnie is not a "whodunit" but a "why-is-she-doing-it" type of film by Alfred Hitchcock. Mark Rutledge admonishes the audience that we are "not supposed to get it," when he defends his attraction to a thief and a liar.
Marnie, hired under a fictitious name as a secretary for four months in the New York accounting office of Mr. Strutt, robs her boss of a considerable sum of money. Marnie changes her hairdo and identity every time she robs a place. She then returns to her mother in Baltimore with presents. Her relationship with mom is fought with abnormal psychological overtones. The mother is in a state of denial about how she feels about her daughter; while the daughter exhibits strange behavior such as, freaking out at seeing red gladiolus in her mother's vase. She is trying to gain her mother's love by materially providing for her while also desperately trying to please
by being a respectable woman. The highlight of her home visit comes when her mother exclaims: "decent women don't have a need for a man;" and, Marnie accepts this as gospel. It seems that the mother didn't mention anything about stealing, as part of a person being decent. Like...