Wood makes extensive reference to the notion that Hitchcock, having sufficiently established his exceptional mastery of the cinematic medium over a career’s span, was content to resort to effective “shorthand” by the debut of Marnie.1  Marnie’s flashes to red, for example, and the tackily-painted sets were not, in Wood’s assessment, the marks of a bumbling amateur, but of a master who had learned what degree of symbolism was just enough.  The film's color motifs emerge shaped by the same frugal visual vocabulary as the film’s other technical aspects.  Only two color dichotomies are presented: one directly diegetic, one more traditionally nondiegetic. Even within such conservative bounds, the scenery of the film, despite its departure from the polished norms of Hollywood, does figure strongly into the plot at every turn.