Reception
The film was a moderate box office success; it grossed $7 million in theatres on a budget of $3 million.
Leonard Maltin has argued that Marnie was ahead of its time, while in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto describes it as Hitchcock's last masterpiece.
The film's special effects are often criticized as unconvincing, with critics noting such things as obvious matte paintings and back projection. However, in a making-of documentary on the DVD, Robin Wood, author of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, argues that they can be defended if one notes the roots of the film in German Expressionism:
worked in German studios at first, in the silent period. Very early on when he started making films, he saw Fritz Lang's German silent films; he was enormously influenced by that, and Marnie is basically an expressionist film in many ways. Things like scarlet suffusions over the screen, back-projection and backdrops, artificial-looking thunderstorms—these are expressionist devices and one has to accept them. If one doesn't accept them then one doesn't understand and can't possibly like Hitchcock.
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