Alan Napier

An introductory WWII newsreel sets the stage. D-Day is fast approaching, but the exact date and designated invasion beaches are closely-held secrets. The British Isles are bulging with troops, ships and equipment. The story begins in London on May 31, 1944. An American army major, Jefferson Pike (James Garner), enters Allied Forces HQ to discuss the ongoing invasion preparations. The top brass aren't convinced that Allied deception efforts have fooled the Germans. While poring over a wall map of German troop dispositions in France, Pike inadvertently slides his finger along the edge of the map, incurring a nasty paper cut. To hedge their bets, the High Command sends Pike to Lisbon to meet with a German double agent and see what he knows. Pike expresses concerns that if captured and tortured, he might reveal exact invasion details. His superiors feel that the risk is justified. As Pike flies out of London in civilian garb, a German spy sees him boarding the plane and reports it to her handlers. Another German spy enters his vacant hotel room and gathers personal items, including photos, letters and hair samples from his brush. In Lisbon, Pike goes to a nightclub to meet his contact but quickly realizes that his drink has been drugged shortly before he passes out. He is soon in German hands, placed in a coffin as a deceased German embassy clerk, and flown to Germany. An American-born German army major, Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor), is a military psychiatrist in charge of an elaborate deception scheme designed to coax the invasion secrets from Major Pike. An entire "American" military convalescent center has been set up deep in a German forest to fool Pike. Major Gerber is given 36 hours to extract the invasion plans from Pike. After that, Pike will be handed over to the SS to gain the information through their usual means. Gerber also understands that the consequences of failure will be catastrophic for his own future. When a groggy, disoriented Pike finally awakens, he is relieved to find himself in Allied hands. Looking in a mirror for the first time, he is shocked to find his dark hair streaked with gray, his skin aged, and his vision blurry. His every move is observed through a two-way mirror. Piece by piece, Pike is sold the idea that it is now May 1950, the war is long over, and he is convalescing at an American military hospital in occupied Germany. Both Major Gerber and pretty nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint) are leading actors in the ruse. Pike's room contains familiar photos and Anna is able to provide accurate details about his parents. Rigorous measures are taken to ensure that Pike is surrounded by dozens of role players who are fluent in American speech dialects and customs. No one is allowed to speak German, even out of Pike's hearing. Pike is told that he is suffering from severe amnesia, a side effect from the severe "beating" he supposedly absorbed after the Lisbon incident six years earlier. According to the cover story, Pike was found wandering alone in Lisbon and sent back to the US to recuperate, but continual regressions over the years dictated that he be sent to Major Gerber in Germany for experimental psychological therapy. His nurse tells him that she and Pike have been married for two months, but due to another regression he doesn't remember her. In an unguarded moment with Anna, Pike asks about the war's closing months and mentions something about the invasion sites having been in Normandy. She tries to conceal her shock and reports the sensational disclosure to Major Gerber, who then manages to skillfully extract the most important invasion details from the trusting Pike. The race is on. The date is now June 2. After the session with Gerber, Pike is absent-mindedly rubbing his fingers together when he suddenly irritates the painful paper cut incurred in London two days earlier. Gradually recalling the injury, confusion registers on his face. With his suspicions aroused, Pike takes steps to confirm his worst fears and then violently confronts Anna, who admits to the elaborate plot. She explains that she went along with the ruse in order to buy her way out of a concentration camp. Out of hatred for her captors, she agrees to help Pike. He tells her to run out of his room screaming that he has escaped and that he has known about the plot from the outset. Pike slips out the back way, knowing that he will be caught. Now the Germans must determine whether Pike was telling the truth about Normandy or trying to deceive them. A disappointed Major Gerber asks how and when Pike figured out the scheme and Pike tells him about the paper cut. Gerber explains that Pike was carefully examined for injuries when he arrived, but the cut was obviously concealed in a skin crease. Gerber still thinks Normandy was a truthful answer, but he knows no one will believe him. The SS indeed discounts Pike's accurate story and allows the bulk of the German forces to remain idled near Calais. Gerber explains regretfully that Pike will now be handed over to the tender mercies of the SS. Hating the SS and realizing that he will probably be executed for his costly failure, Major Gerber settles on a daring plan to have his pioneering research on psychological combat trauma live on. He gives his research papers to Pike and Anna, advises them how to get across the border, and helps them escape from their locked room. The race for freedom is now on, with a zealous SS officer trying to capture the pair before they can escape over the Swiss border.

The story opens as a woman with dark hair, seen only from behind, carries a suitcase along a train platform. The yellow purse tucked under her arm is presented at such an angle that it is suggestive of female genitalia. In the next scene, outraged business owner Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel) rants to a pair of detectives that he was "cleaned out" by a female employee named Marion Holland whom he obviously hired for her looks despite her lack of professional references. A client of Strutt's, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), overhears the conversation and says that he remembers this woman, wryly referring to her as "the brunette with the legs." The woman, real name Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) is a compulsive thief, and has made off with almost $10,000 stashed in the yellow purse. She changes her appearance, going from brunette to blonde, and flees with the cash, journeying south to a town in Virginia where she keeps her beloved horse, Forio, stabled. She then visits her mother Bernice (Louise Latham) in Baltimore. She lavishes her mother with expensive gifts in an attempt to impress her and win her love, but the woman is cold and distant with Marnie, showing much more maternal affection towards a little neighbor girl named Jessie whom she babysits. Marnie's intense jealousy of Jessie seems inappropriate for a grown woman to express, and along with her panic over a bouquet of red gladiolas and her mother's insistence that "decent" women don't need men, the first hints of the dysfunction that drives Marnie to lie and steal appear. Time goes by and Marnie constructs a new identity, Mary Taylor, with the intent to run her scam again on another victim. She applies for a job at a printing company in Philadelphia owned by none other than Mark Rutland. Despite her now chestnut hair, he recognizes Marnie as the woman who stole from Strutt, but, excited by the thrill of chasing and capturing the attractive criminal, he hires her. Marnie robs Rutland, too, but he anticipated this outcome and manages to track Marnie down. Instead of handing her over to the police, he blackmails her into marrying him. On their honeymoon, which takes place aboard a cruise ship, Mark finds out about Marnie's frigidity. At first, he respects her wishes, but soon obsessed with controlling and dominating Marnie, he rapes her. The next morning, she tries to commit suicide by drowning herself in a pool aboard the ship, but Mark finds her in time to resuscitate her. In addition to Marnie's aversion to sex and generally troubled behavior, Mark's marriage faces a challenge from Lil (Diane Baker), the sister of his deceased first wife who clearly had designs on him and views Marnie as a rival she can overthrow. Upon learning that Mark has bought Strutt's silence by paying off the money Marnie stole, Lil invites Strutt to a party at the house. Strutt recognizes Marnie, the former "Marion Holland" who outfoxed and humiliated him, but grudgingly keeps quiet about her crime when Rutland threatens to take his business elsewhere and convince other clients to do the same. Meanwhile Marnie takes Forio out on their first fox hunt. As the hounds descend upon the fox in a snarling pack, Marnie sees the bright red jacket of one of the hunters; the combination of the violent scene and the color triggers Marnie's own fight-or-flight response. She charges away into the woods at a mad gallop. She loses control of Forio and can't rein him in when he heads for a high stone wall. The horse breaks both of his front legs against the wall and crashes to the other side in agony. Marnie is forced to shoot Forio to put the animal out of his misery, an act that ruptures her already fragile state of mind. Still armed with the gun she used to kill her horse, she heads for the Rutland safe. She's driven to repeat her usual modus operandi-- steal from Mark and run away, but by putting Marnie in a position where she already owns anything she might ordinarily be tempted to steal, Mark has frustrated her compulsive desires. Marnie breaks down in a welter of neurotic conflict. Mark attempts to discover the root of Marnie's compulsions, nightmares and odd phobias: of thunderstorms, of men and of the color red. He takes Marnie to her mother's house in Baltimore where he demands an explanation of the "bad accident" Bernice suffered. He knows from reading reports of the incident that Bernice made her living as a prostitute whose main clientele were the sailors that frequented Baltimore's shipyards. Marnie relives the night when she was six years old and one of her mother's clients (Bruce Dern) approached Marnie as she cowered on the sofa, frightened by a thunderstorm. Bernice reacted to the sight of the drunken sailor caressing her daughter by attacking him frantically. Seeing her mother struggling with the man, Marnie struck him on the head with a fireplace poker, killing him. The blood spouting from his head wound to drench his white uniform led to her fear of the color red. Bernice explains that she became pregnant with Marnie as a teen after she'd been lured into having sex by the promise of her date's basketball sweater, and tells her daughter that she claimed responsibility for the sailor's death and fought to keep the authorities from placing Marnie in a foster home because Marnie's the only thing she ever really loved. Relieved of the repressed traumatic memories that poisoned her subconscious, Marnie believes that she is capable of renouncing crime and sustaining an intimate relationship. She and Mark ride back to his family estate.

Based on Edgar Allan Poe's story about a cataleptic Englishman obsessed with the fear of being buried alive. Emily Gault arrives at the Carrell mansion determined to rekindle an old relationship with Guy Carrell, despite the disapproval of his sister, Kate. Guy overcomes his all-consuming fear of being buried alive long enough to marry Emily but soon becomes obsessed again, building a crypt designed to guarantee that he will not fall prey to his most dreaded nightmare. Trying to prove that he has been cured of his phobia, he opens his father's tomb and is shocked into a catatonic state. His worst fears are realized as he is lowered into a grave and covered over, apparently never to learn that the treachery of someone very dear to him was directly responsible for his predicament. —Doug Sederberg <vornoff@sonic.net> The wealthy cataleptic painter Guy Carrell believes that he overheard his father, who also had catalepsy, crying in the crypt of his family when he was a kid and is obsessed by the fear of being buried alive. He leaves his fiancée Emily Gault and lives alone with his sister Kate Carrell in the family manor. However Emily seeks him out and convinces Guy to marry her, despite the disapproval of Kate, promising that she would never bury him without the certainty of his death by her friend, Dr. Miles Archer, and her father Dr. Gideon Gault. After the wedding, Guy does not travel in honeymoon to Venice, as he had promised to Emily, and builds a crypt with safety devices to avoid that he is trapped alive inside. However Emily and Miles convince him to demolish the building. Guy has nightmares and visions with the gravediggers and weird events happen in the mansion. He decides to prove that is cured of his fear and opens his father grave, but someone has moved his skeleton and Guy is diagnosed of heart attack. However he is catatonic indeed and is buried alive as he has always feared. Will be the end of Guy? Who might have caused the shock on Guy? —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

British police are after a serial killer who lures his female victims through newspaper personal ads and sends cryptic poem clues to the cops. A serial killer in London is murdering young women he meets through the personal columns of newspapers. He announces each of his murders to the police by sending them a cryptic poem. After a dancer disappears, the police enlist an American friend of hers, Sandra Carpenter, to answer advertisements in the personal columns, and lure the killer.