Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, though popularly derided as the first of his lackluster final films, boasts a veritable trove of visual, thematic, and intertextual mastery.  Bound by Hitchcock's signature ambiguity, Marnie’s thematic elements combine to cast the film’s protagonists in a marvelously complex array of lights that reflect the culmination of a career's worth of progressively more clearly-defined ideas.  In particular, Marnie brings to a head the peculiarly Hitchcockian gender and identity politics that have been emerging through the body of the director’s work.  Indeed, Bernard Herrmann’s score for the film reaches a peak of its own: though overstated, it, like the other aspects of the film, amplifies Hitchcock's newly-peaked grasp of his ideas about identity crises, the horror of the sexual other (1,2), morality, and the "appropriate" dynamic of the male-female relationship (1,2) .