Marnie

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

MARNIE is the film about a poor, helpless felon who needs a repulsively self-satisfied man to trap her, rape her, and control every aspect of her existence until he cures her through the power of his manly will. It’s like THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, but in this version, both combatants are horrid criminals. Marnie’s signature line is, “Oh, Mark. I don’t want to go to jail. I’d rather stay with you.” That, kids, is romance.

The film stars Tippi Hendren as a woman who is so disconnected from her true self that she appears more blonde automoton than an actual human being. Or perhaps that’s just Hendren’s acting technique. Sean Connery plays the repulsive, sadistic rapist as, basically, Sean Connery (Interesting side note: his character, Mark, is from Pennsylvania, yet he has a Scottish accent. His father has an English accent. So much for the Pennsylvania Dutch!). These people have never been less interesting.

Alfred Hitchcock directed MARNIE, yet the film has all the polish of a poorly made rerun from Sunday Night at the Movies. Between the annoying use of red filters to show Marnie’s near-total paralysis at the sight of the color red (Really, what does this woman do when she menstruates? Curl up in a corner and scream for four days?) and its ridiculously amateurish in-n-out zooming at a moment of moral crisis, one can only forgive Hitch by assuming that he was on heavy psychotropic drugs throughout the process of making this movie and give him a pass.

Some people love MARNIE. But hey, some people love balut. I don’t ever need another go at either.

Zardoz

Remember that old Star Trek episode where hippies took over the Enterprise? ZARDOZ is the kind of movie those hippies might have made.

It’s a psychedelic science fiction morality tale that’s both deeply grounded in the Western liberal arts tradition and deeply distrustful of it. In the film, the world has gone to hell. Zed, played by Sean Connery, is a horseman and a raider who follows the warrior god Zardoz, who appears to be a giant flying granite head. When Zardoz takes him to an enclave of civilization (as defined by the Western liberal arts tradition), he’s horrified to see beautiful people engaged in intellectual pursuits while, on the outside, barbarians fight, starve, and die in the cold. Kind of like how a Darfur refugee might feel if a giant flying granite head transported him to Saint John’s College.

The Eloi, for lack of a better term, are better than Johnnies, however. First, their women dress like those hippies from Star Trek, but without television’s costume restrictions. That’s right – nearly all the exposition and philosophy in this movie issues from the mouths of partially clad young women. There’s your entertainment value, right there. Second, they’re functionally immortal. Third, their revelry in the western intellectual heritage appears to be confined to works taught in nearly every college prep curriculum in the English-speaking world, so the reasonably educated viewer can indulge in the fantasy that he or she is an Eloi, too.

That’s plenty of fun, and there’s a certain amount of ironic entertainment to be had with the film’s hippie vibe, but there’s something else happening here, too. John Boorman, who wrote and directed this film, is trying to make an art movie with ZARDOZ. The film opens with a Shakespeare-style prologue, given by a Feste-like character who, we later discover, has a deep love for drama. With this prologue, Boorman tells us that ZARDOZ is not supposed to be just another sci-fi romp, but a meditation on the nature of belief, the duality of man, the class system, and the dangers of shutting oneself off from the world. Sure, this is all stuff that H.G. Wells, Fritz Lang, and even Gene Roddenberry hit time and time again, but one can’t deny a certain something about Boorman’s psychedelic take on the material. By the time the Fool commits his last foolish act, we find that we’ve actually bought into the trippy world of ZARDOZ, we actually care about what happens to Zed, and we’re actually thinking about the place of higher learning in a world beset by tragedy.

All this and gratuitous nudity, to boot. Color me surprised: ZARDOZ is actually a good time at the movies. Who knew?