The Early '60s

A couple of grizzled movies, nearly 50 years on:

MARNIE (1964) (B) -- This luscious color film from late period Hitchcock fetishizes Tippi Hedren in the extreme and goes schizoid-nutso on the Freudian psychodrama. I've often had trouble with the aging process of many of Alfred Hitchcock's movies; their quirkiness and idiosyncrasies seem to leave the candy-colored films coated with an amber, uh, film. In a word, they're dated. Here, Hedren plays the title role as a grifter haunted by a childhood trauma that interferes with her relationship with her mother. She gets caught stealing money from her employer and is bullied into marriage by the hunky executive played by Sean Connery in full Don Draper mode. Diane Baker and Alan Napier sizzle in supporting roles, and Connery and Hedren click at times. But Hedren too often is a glamorous cipher, struggling to sustain her character's trauma. The suspense ebbs and flows, and the big reveal isn't much of a shocker. For a while, Marnie's fear of intimacy with the opposite sex hints at an intriguing suggestion of homosexuality, but the idea fizzles at some point, and Hitchcock's psychoanalysis grows trite by the final reel. A running time of 130 minutes doesn't help. This one's fun and at times fascinating, but it doesn't rank with the master's classics.

JOHNNY COOL (1964) (C) -- I keep running across this one on the THIS TV channel, and it hits so smack dab in my early-childhood wheelhouse and formative media-world view that it's hard to resist. Henry Silva ("Manchurian Candidate," "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai") stars in the title role as a Sicilian outlaw recruited to America to knock off a string of underworld figures in that pre-"Bonnie and Clyde" style where gunshot victims merely wince and fall over and spill no discernible blood. Silva gives an almost bizarre monotone performance amid a swirl of hammy turns from B-list Hollywood types like Jim Backus, Mort Sahl and Telly Savalas. With Peter Lawford executive producing, we get Joey Bishop as a hyperactive TV car salesman and an eye-patched Sammy Davis Jr. crooning the hacky theme song. California co-stars as the dream location, so seductive in teasing black-and-white. But the real reason to tune in is for Elizabeth Montgomery as Darien "Dare" Guiness, who gets drawn in as Johnny's moll and loses her crazy head over the meatball. Montgomery (her husband, William Asher, directed) smolders as the aimless rich divorcee who takes leave of her senses like a high school girl seduced by a letterman's jacket. The future "Bewitched" star can barely contain her sexuality, and the scene in which she tells the bad boy "Johnny, I need you; I need you right now" is a rush. Otherwise, this cheeseball story is a leftover relic from Sinatra's '50s run ragged by "Ocean's Eleven" audition rejects. This guilty pleasure has its moments.

BONUS TRACK

A clip from "Johnny Cool"