Rebecca (1940)

Official trailer

Rebecca is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 American gothic romance adapting Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name.

The film depicts a young unnamed woman who marries widowed aristocrat Maxim de Winter and finds his Cornwall estate Manderley haunted by the memory of his first wife Rebecca, whose mysterious death continues to dominate the household. Laurence Olivier plays Maxim de Winter. Joan Fontaine plays the second Mrs. de Winter, who has no first name in either novel or film. Judith Anderson plays Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper devoted to Rebecca’s memory.

George Sanders plays Rebecca’s cousin Jack Favell. Reginald Denny plays Frank Crawley. Robert Sherwood and Joan Harrison wrote the screenplay from an adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan. David O. Selznick produced the film on a budget of approximately 1.3 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 4 million dollars on initial release. The work won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Cinematography.

Rebecca disturbs me in a way few old films do. I’m pulled into that enormous house right along with Fontaine, feeling small and watched and out of place, and I think it’s the most purely atmospheric thing Hitchcock made. It’s gorgeous and suffocating at the same time.

The film is Hitchcock’s first American production and his only Best Picture winner. The director arrived from England with a contract that limited his control over this picture. Selznick rewrote scenes, reordered scenes, and demanded changes Hitchcock resisted. The result represents collaboration between Hitchcock and Selznick instead of pure Hitchcock authorship. Fontaine plays the protagonist as continuously overwhelmed by her surroundings, her marriage, and the dead woman whose name she shares with no one but can’t escape. Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers became one of the definitive screen villains.

The Manderley setting is a character. Rebecca herself never appears on screen, yet dominates every scene. The film set the gothic romance template that later decades extended.

The Absent Rebecca

Rebecca dies before the film begins. She never appears on screen. Her body is recovered from a sunken boat. Her possessions remain in her old rooms. Her monogrammed handkerchiefs stay folded. Her dogs still respond to commands she gave them. The character exists entirely through the testimony of survivors and the physical traces she left in the house.

The decision never to show Rebecca forces her into the audience’s imagination. Each viewer constructs Rebecca from what other characters say. Mrs. Danvers describes her as goddess-like. Maxim eventually reveals her as monstrous. The audience holds multiple incompatible Rebeccas at once. The absent character becomes more powerful than any cast member could have made her. Hitchcock argued that showing the audience what to fear weakens fear. Letting the audience build their own fear strengthens it.

That absence is the smartest thing in the film and my favorite thing about it. I end up with my own Rebecca in my head, and she’s scarier than any actress could have been. Every folded handkerchief in that house feels like it’s watching.

Mrs. Danvers

Judith Anderson plays Mrs. Danvers as a woman whose attachment to her dead employer exceeds every conventional category. The performance is restrained almost to motionlessness. She glides through rooms instead of walks.

She appears in doorways without sound. Anderson refused to blink during her scenes with Fontaine, producing an unsettling quality conventional acting didn’t generate.

Anderson flat-out scares me. That unblinking stare and the way she seems to arrive in a room without crossing it are enough to make my neck prickle. I’d put her Danvers on any shortlist of great screen villains, and she gets there almost without moving.

The character has acquired particular cultural reference standing as the template for the obsessive female antagonist in gothic narratives. The cinematic technique of having her appear silently behind the protagonist became standard in horror filmmaking. Anderson was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and lost to Jane Darwell for The Grapes of Wrath. The performance has aged into classic status. Later productions of Rebecca measure their Mrs. Danvers against the Anderson original and typically fail to match it.

The Production Code Ending

Du Maurier’s novel reveals that Maxim killed Rebecca after she taunted him about an affair and her pregnancy by another man. The novel makes Maxim a murderer. The 1940 Production Code forbade films where murderers escape punishment. The Production Code office required the death to become an accident. In the film, Rebecca falls and strikes her head during her confrontation with Maxim. He hides the body but doesn’t kill her.

Hitchcock worked out the accident version himself. The film thereby removes the moral complexity that drives the novel’s second half. The protagonist, horrified by Rebecca, must reckon with her beloved Maxim being a killer. The accident version eliminates that reckoning. Maxim becomes only a hider of evidence instead of a murderer. The novel’s harsher reading remains for readers who want it. The film gives a softened version that Production Code constraints required.

This is the one real complaint I have, and it’s a big one. Turning Maxim from a murderer into a man who covered up an accident lets him off the hook and lets the film off with him, and I think the story is poorer and safer for it. I’d trade the tidy version for the novel’s darker one in a heartbeat, Production Code or no Production Code.

Does Rebecca still hold up?

It’s a 9, and I’d push it higher if Selznick and the censors had let Hitchcock keep Maxim a killer. Everything else works for me: Fontaine’s overwhelmed, swallowed-up heroine, Anderson’s Danvers, Manderley looming over all of it, and a title character who never once appears and still runs the house. The softened ending is the only thing that costs it the last point, and it costs that point because the novel’s version was braver.

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