Silver Screen: Rebecca

PG130 min

This is Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, and the only film he directed to win a best Picture Oscar. The film is adapted from the book by Daphne Du Maurier, the second that Hitchcock directed, after Jamaica Inn (1939). David O. Selznick, who was already in the process of luring Hitch to Hollywood, bought the rights and gave it to Hitchcock. The story and the adaptation contain many quintessentially gothic elements; a naïve young female protagonist, an overbearing authoritarian male, and a vast, oppressive mansion. Joan Fontaine plays the central un-named character who meets the aristocratic Maxim de Winter on the French Riviera. De Winter is an enigma, apparently grief-stricken over the drowning of his beloved first wife, Rebecca. Nevertheless, he proposes, and the heroine moves to Manderley, his estate on the Cornish coast. There she meets his housekeeper, the austere Mrs Danvers, who proceeds to make her life a misery while De Winter is cold and distant. Hitchcock expertly builds the tension in this house of lies and deceit until the final shattering reveal of the truth of what happened to Rebecca. Hitchcock and Selznick clashed over the film, so much so that Hitch declared to Francois Truffaut that ‘It’s not a Hitchcock picture.’ That may be true thematically, since Hitchcock dismissed the film as a ‘novelette’ – his way of disparaging it as a ‘women’s picture’. But Hitchcock’s mastery of cinematic storytelling is evident in its taught screenplay and exquisite direction, and the core of the film is the depiction of Fontaine’s character finding her own strength and identity in this desolate, haunted place.