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• Marnie (1964)

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The five minute safe robbery at the Rutland Company in the 1964 film Marnie is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most skillfully composed and effective suspense scenes in all his work. Hitchcock’s definition of suspense demanded the maximum amount of knowledge about the events of the scene to be emotionally involved in the characters. He hated surprise for the sake of shock. In Marnie, he combined realistic qualities of a long take and natural use of sound with the more expressionistic qualities of high and low angle shot angles and quick cuts from multiple perspectives.

Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a compulsive thief, who is newly hired by Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) to work in his publishing office. The robbery sequence begins at the end of the day as office workers are leaving for the weekend. In the scene’s most neatly composed shot Hitchcock divides the screen symmetrically, nearly in half, looking down a hallway. The audience views most of the action from a distance. To the left is the empty hallway with other desks of the office floor, and to the right in the background is the boss’s office with a large green safe, which Marnie will rob.

In near total silence as Marnie manipulates the combination and removes cash from the safe, we suddenly become aware of a cleaning woman on the left, mopping the floor. Marnie looks over her shoulder numerous times as each woman’s actions proceed toward the foreground in the shot. Hitchcock’s editing quickens and as Marnie realizes the cleaning woman is there, but not yet aware of her presence, as she plans an escape which includes taking off her high heeled shoes and placing them in her coat pockets. The tension mounts as Hitchcock gets the viewer to actually emphasize with the thief, as we hope she finds an escape.