Our fabulous double-bill! Come to either element, or £12 gets you a bumper evening of insight and inside information. Plus, as Marnie was originally described in its publicity material in 1964, a “suspenseful sex mystery” of a Hitchcock film.
18:15 Tippi Hedren in conversation, live via satellite link, tickets £7
20:00 Screening of Marnie (click to book), digitally re-mastered and deluxe, tickets £5
SEX – there, got your attention! And it certainly got Hitchcock’s attention, too; never more so than in the two films he made with Tippi Hedren, The Birds and Marnie. Infamous for his infatuations with his glacial, blonde leading ladies – equally infamous for his bullying of them – he was always challenging the boundaries, and the thriller with the smoulderingly frigid blonde at the centre was a distinctive genre created by Hitchcock himself. Speaking live tonight, Hedren talks about this relationship which nearly broke her; daughter Melanie Griffiths; and her fabled love of endangered Big Cats. And that’s just for starters! After the interview we are following with Marnie.
The BFI is currently offering an exhaustive tribute to our home grown (Chingford) Master in it’s season “The Genius of Alfred Hitchcock.” But why should we still find him fresh, shocking and distinctive?
“He was suspenseful, sexy, dangerous,” explains the BFI’s Creative Director Heather Stewart, who has obviously spent many happy hours with her team digging in the archives. ”From the very first shot of his very first film (The Pleasure Garden, 1926), he shows a girl’s legs coming down a staircase. He’s voyeuristic, tantalising. He understood that people always wanted more. You’re safe watching it in the cinema, but he’s playing with you from the go-get.”
And with the censors of the time, too, it seems, who couldn’t restrain the twinkle in his eye… ”In Notorious, Hitchcock wasn’t allowed to show a protracted kiss. So instead, he had Cary Grant nibbling Ingrid Bergman’s ear, talking to her, seducing her. We’re completely involved. Sometimes, he even put things in on purpose so the censors had to remove it.”
Which brings us to Marnie, a perverse pleasure if ever there was one! Take one measure cool blonde, throw in persistent kleptomania and sexual frigidity, and shake with a saturnine performance from a young Sean Connery. Not to be missed!
