In a Remake of Gone With the Wind
A Southern girl kills a stranger who has entered her home wearing a uniform. Although the girl blots the incident from her conscious mind, she is troubled by a succession of ominous dreams. Maneuvered into marrying a wealthy man she does not love, he ravishes her once, in a moment of weakness. Forced to attend a party where she risks utter humiliation, she is rescued by one of the hosts. After a climactic horseback-riding accident late in the story, a beloved horse is put down.
This checklist of specific details has been carefully worded so that it applies to no single film, but two at the very least: Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, and Gone With the Wind, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, the first motion picture assigned to Hitchcock after his arrival in America.
Hitchcock’s contribution to the 1939 film consisted of no more than a few notes for a suspenseful domestic scene (notes which appear to have been ignored), but he was among the army of employees who toiled on the project for his new boss, David O. Selznick.
As readers of Winston Graham’s novel Marnie will be aware, nearly a third of the similarities included in my checklist were added by Hitchcock and his procession of screenwriters. Graham’s Marnie Elmer is “Southern” only in the sense of hailing from the south of England, and she kills no one, either in or out of uniform.
So, do I think Alfred Hitchcock deliberately stole the romantic storyline from a 1939 Civil War Era epic for his new film? It‘s generally accepted that Hitchcock changed his heroine’s surname from Elmer to Edgar and set the climax of the film in Baltimore because of his reverence for Edgar Allen Poe, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find other strains of playfulness in his adaptation. In fact, since Hitchcock had screened a Bond movie or two while scouting for his new leading man, the director might have found it hard to resist the chance to play in the Eon sandbox.
Hitchcock’s final screenwriter on Marnie, Jay Presson Allen, agreed with her boss that Sean Connery might be an ideal choice for the role of Marnie’s husband, Mark Rutland - or at least for the version they were now devising. While Mark is a relatively passive character in the book, Connery portrays him as an alert predator with an encyclopedic store of knowledge, and a man of refinement who tosses off witty gems with the dry insouciance that movie audiences had come to expect from the screen’s James Bond.
Changes made to Mark’s home life also seem designed to suggest the Bond milieu. In the novel Mark’s widowed mother rarely pays him a visit. In the film Mark lives on his family estate with his wise and benevolent widower father (Alan Napier). While there is no secretary to stand in for Moneypenny, Mark trades wisecracks with his late wife’s kid-sister Lil (Diane Baker), a beautiful brunette who overtly flirts with Mark, even in front of his new bride Marnie (Tippi Hedren).
At the wedding of Mark and Marnie we also meet Cousin Bob (Bob Sweeney), the family’s humorless banker, who equips Mark with any financial instrument he needs, but finds nothing funny about Mark’s quips or his carefree attitude towards money.
Thus, in Hitchcock’s Marnie, the actor who had already played James Bond in two films and would soon catch a plane to join the production of Goldfinger, found himself in the midst of alternate-universe versions of “M,” Moneypenny, and “Q,” in the form of Dad, Lil, and Cousin Bob, none of whom bear any resemblance to characters from Winston Graham’s book.
It is probably only a coincidence that in the film version of Goldfinger, MI6’s armourer “Q” suddenly begins sparring verbally with Bond, treating 007 with the same testy disapproval that Cousin Bob expresses behind Mark Rutland’s back. However, there is surely nothing coincidental about the aggressive treatment of women in the two films.
The heroine of Hitchcock’s Marnie descends into a catatonic state during her ordeal with Mark in the bedroom, then attempts to drown herself in a swimming pool - a reasonable translation of what happens in the book.
Contrast this with a scene in the film Goldfinger, when 007 attempts to give the reluctant Miss Galore a roll in the straw, pressing down on her and smothering her mouth with his. After suddenly deciding that she may not be “strictly the outdoor type” after all, she folds her arms around him and kisses him back passionately. Not a whit of this happens in Fleming’s novel. While the scene may have been dreamed up as a shortcut for recruiting Pussy as Bond’s ally, it certainly feels like a sendup of Marnie.
Fleming’s thriller Goldfinger, which was published two years before Winston Graham’s novel about a compulsive thief, gives James Bond more opportunities for armchair psychoanalysis than Graham’s Mark Rutland ever dreams of performing. However, it’s only at the end of Fleming’s book that Bond learns Pussy’s secret. Her icy demeanor shields the wounded child who was molested by an older male relative in the American South. In the movie adaptation that Fleming envisioned, she would have been played by Elizabeth Taylor, recently seen in Raintree County, a film about the Antebellum South and the American Civil War.
Soon after the premiere of Goldfinger, Connery started work on his third movie of 1964, The Hill, marking the first of five films he would make with American director Sidney Lumet, and his first time wearing a mustache on the big screen.
In her review for a televised airing of The Hill, New York critic Judith Crist suggested that if people tuning in would only turn down the volume on the television, they could watch Sean Connery turn into Clark Gable before their eyes. Add one more checkmark next to Gone With the Wind.