‘The brunette with the legs’: the significance of footwear in Marnie

Marnie (1964, Alfred Hitchcock) is a film about sex and crime; in particular, about ‘the sexual aberrations of the criminal female’, according to the title of the book Mark Rutland reads to try to understand his new wife. The conduct of said criminal female, Margaret Edgar, Marion Holland, or just plain Marnie, is based on feminine masquerade and an aesthetics of what Michele Montrelay might call ‘dotty objects’: gloves, purses, handbags, nail files, hair combs, stockings and – most significantly – shoes. This chapter demonstrates the film’s deployment of shoes as a trope of Marnie’s identity, and explore how they symbolise different sides to Marnie at stages in her story. In so doing, the film imbues feminine artifice with significance and stature, enabling Marnie’s identity to be explored by elements of the mise-en-scene that might ordinarily be considered simply decorative.