I have this on bluray and the extras include an introduced by Hitch. He says it is a "sex" movie (thriller or crime story, I forget, but he used the word sex clearly).
Wouldn't that have been extremely dodgy to say back then?
Maybe more titillating than it would be today, but no. In fact at least one of the posters for the film said something like 'Alfred Hitchcock's suspenseful sex mystery...MARNIE'
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Back in them there old days it really had a different meaning, in this case a "sexy mystery". No one really thought of it as a movie with sex in it, because that kind of movie would have only been shown in a theater in a certain part of big cities. At that same time a popular movie genre were "sex comedy," which had no sex but were just comedies about the battle of the sexes (think of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies and their imitators). Today, now that people have figured out how to construct hyphenated names and terms, they are called rom-coms.
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