Plot Intro
An unnamed heroine (Joan Fontaine) who is nervous, introverted and working for a cantankerous upper class lady, meets Max de Winter (Laurence Olivier) who is handsome, kind, debonair and, most importantly, filthy stinking rich. The two fall in love, marry, and Max sweeps our heroine off to his colossal Cornwall mansion, Mandeley. But when she arrives, our poor heroine finds it difficult to adjust, due to the shadow of Max’s deceased first wife, Rebecca, still lurking within the mansion- not least due to the mentally-unhinged housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), who would feel more at home in the hotel in The Shining.
Doug says...
We’re into the ‘40s! And our film journey takes an abrupt twist with a move away from the films reflecting the contemporary time, full of war and glory, and gives us this early Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s superb novel Rebecca. It’s the second one in a row based on a novel, and what I find interesting about this faithful adaptation is that it actually mirrors the less than great moments that are in the book itself.
What I mean by this is that in the novel, the last third takes a turn for the duller side, full of inquests and court cases and pages of necessary but relatively uninteresting events. And so it is in the film - the first two thirds and the ending are terrific, but there’s a distinct point when the events become less absorbing, and start being a slight chore to plod through. This said, the film benefits from two excellent performances - that of Joan Fontaine (stunningly beautiful) as the timid and naive Second Mrs De Winter and that of Judith Anderson as the still-pretty-terrifying housekeeper Mrs Danvers, whose obsession with Rebecca - the late First Mrs De Winter - utterly consumes her. Laurence Olivier turns in a pretty bog-standard performance as Max De Winter, but utterly fails to lend him any charm making all of his pretty dickhead-ish actions even more unforgiveable. The moment when the Second Mrs De Winter (importantly she is never named in novel or film) sweeps down in a costume to a fancy dress party, unknowingly wearing the same thing as Rebecca did a year before, Max turns on her and sends her away crying. It’s a pretty nasty thing to do, especially as the Second Mrs De Winter is such a timid little thing.
It’s the first American film Hitchcock did and as such there are hints of what is yet to come - he uses light and shadow carefully, rendering Mrs Danvers a terrifying presence simply through her stillness, and manages to make the Second Mrs De Winter look tiny and insignificant in nearly every camera shot. It’s not a masterpiece, and doesn’t particularly feel Hitchcockian, but I enjoyed most of it. It’s terribly overacted and I have to say the general acting style of the ‘30s and ‘40s is beginning to grate now, given that I come from an era when naturalism is considered the ultimate goal in performance. We found ourselves making lots of jokes throughout, and the only moments we were truly sucked in were when Judith Anderson materialised and terrified everyone. I am still quite a fan of the Brief Encounter-esque delivery of lines (clipped British accents, rattled through at great speed), but I’m definitely looking forward to a move away from this highly emotional style of performance. It’s a decent adaptation of a great novel, but certainly not my favourite film so far.
Highlight
The (very famous) moment where Mrs Danvers pins the Second Mrs De Winter in the window frame and murmurs in her ear that she should commit suicide and jump right there and then is terrifying. You want to slap her hard and tell her she’s fired, but yet no one does.
Lowlight
The courtroom and inquest scenes were so dull and tediously written that I switched off entirely, checked social media, and then had to quickly wikipedia what had happened.
Mark
7/10 (one mark higher because of Anderson’s great work)
Paul says...
I love Alfred Hitchcock films. And I also love usurious melodramas involving mansions and women in big dresses. So Rebecca was always going to be far from a flop.
The film is a bit of an anomaly, both in the Hitchcock canon and as a Best Picture winner. In terms of Hitchcock’s career, it’s his first film made in Hollywood. It sits between his tales of mystery, adventure and espionage of the ’30s (such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes), and the “murder-in-the-household” suspense stories of the ’40s (Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt). Rebecca is a combination of the two. On the one hand, it’s rife with handsome men with dark secrets, locked west wings and striking revelations in the mist. It’s 50 Shades of Grey for the Enid Blyton generation. On the other hand, it has the delicate, sinister Hitchcock touch. Sun shining through windows creating jail-bar-like shadows across the main characters’ faces; Mrs Danvers’ minimal movements, giving her a serpentine quality; Hitchcock telling Joan Fontaine that the cast hates her so that she would seem all the more frightened and pathetic (IMDB fun fact!); all minuscule ideas that, when combined, create an efficacious whole. This is unlike the grandiose colours, music and total lack of subtlety in Gone With the Wind or The Great Ziegfeld.
It’s a shame that this is our only encounter with Hitchcock in the Best Picture winners (he was also nominated five times for Best Director but never won) because I’ve always felt his later films, particularly the big-budget thrillers of the ’50s are far stronger. Here, although Judith Anderson steals every scene she is in, Rebecca suffers from the same problem as Cavalcade in that it’s so posh and over-acted that it often becomes maudlin and disingenuous. At the time, this was the style, and it was still a big hit, but it hasn’t aged as well as, say, Rear Window or Psycho.
Also, and this goes back to my assertion that Rebecca is an anomaly in the Best Picture canon, it doesn’t really have much to say. We’ve had melodrama before- Gone With the Wind is hardly a Woody Allen film. But last week’s film had far more to say about the resourcefulness and tenacity of even the most spoilt and selfish of human beings, and about the devastation of war. Rebecca’s a cracking mystery, it’s genuinely creepy, and an excellent study of unlikeable characters (Max is a twat and the heroine’s a wet tissue), but I do think that a film with arguably the most prestigious accolade in the film industry should deliver a story that resonates on more levels than a hysterical gothic adventure.
Is that snobbish of me? Perhaps it is. I should assert that Rebecca is still enjoyable and if you don’t know the twist in the tale, then it’s a good shock. But if you want a more quintessential example of Hitchcock, then look at his films of the ’50s and early ’60s instead.
Highlight
Judith Anderson’s performance as Mrs Danvers sends shivers down your spine. She’s the one part of the film that feels timeless.
Lowlight
“I’m going to violently make love to you behind a palm tree!”- says Max de Winter with absolute dignity, sending Doug and I into immature hysterics.
Mark
6/10
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