"Rebecca"

1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
adapted from the novel by Daphne du Maurier

Mrs. Danvers (to Fontaine’s character): Why don't you go? Why don't you leave Manderley? He doesn't need you... he's got his memories. He doesn't love you, he wants to be alone again with her. You've nothing to stay for. You've nothing to live for really, have you? [softly, almost hypnotically] Look down there. It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you? Why don't you? Go on. Go on. Don't be afraid...

I first saw the film in junior high, I believe, when we were reading the novel Rebecca. I was too young to get into either the novel or the film in a deep way, thought both were a bore. The movie seemed like some old relic; I knew nothing about the storied Laurence Olivier, or of Joan Fontaine (blonde sister to the divine Olivia de Havilland) or the spectacularly slimy George Sanders, to me it was just some school flick hauled out of a closet from next to the hygiene films and unspooled to keep us girls quiet for 90 minutes. As far as the novel was concerned, I thought, “Why doesn’t she just throw out all of Rebecca’s shit and fire Mrs. Danvers?” Indeed. But then we wouldn’t have this delicious tale of psychological suspense.

To sum up: Orphaned and barely legal, nameless lady’s companion Fontaine has accompanied boorish rich American Mrs. Van Hopper to Monte Carlo, where on a solo sketching jaunt she comes upon a suicidal aristocrat, startling him out of taking a cliff dive into the sea. The moody landed gentleman, Maxim de Winter (Olivier playing a version of his later Wuthering Heights creation Heathcliff in a Homburg hat), has not been home to England in months due to a hinted-at personal tragedy. Finding in her a diversion to his ennui, he takes a fancy to our guileless girl and squires her around whenever she can get free of flu-ridden Mrs. Van Biddy. When her patroness tells her to pack up to for a transatlantic steamer trip home to New York, a panic-stricken Fontaine stalls in order to find de Winter and stammer out a goodbye. But de Winter shocks her with a matter-of-fact proposal: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool!”

Thus our naïf is wedded, bedded, and transported toute de suite to the massive, historic, cold English seaside manor Manderley, complete with endless rooms, a staff of 40, a resentful housekeeper, and nothing to do. Manderley has not been changed since the first Mrs. De Winter died a year earlier in a boating mishap. The former mistress – the titular Rebecca – was reportedly wildly popular, stylish, beautiful, and vivacious, all the things the new Mrs. De Winter is not. Traces of Rebecca are everywhere, from her personalized stationery in the morning room to the monograms on the dinner napkins to her entire former bedroom being closed off and enshrined by the housekeeper, the vaguely lesbian and decidely creepy Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson in an Oscar winning performance). This is the point at which my earlier comment becomes pressingly pertinent. Girl, get rid of this hussy’s crap, and cuss your husband out for not taking care of it in the first place! But Maxim is frequently absent, both physically and emotionally, which complicates matters considerably for his bride.

Young, gauche, and inexperienced, our new missus can’t hope to compare and is hopelessly confused, believing her groom is still in love with his fabulous dead wife and allowing icky Danvers to intimidate and dupe her. But when Rebecca’s sleazy “cousin” shows up in the form of Sanders, hinting at previous undercover hi-jinks indulged in by the deceased, things get more confusing.

When a coastal shipwreck reveals the ruin of Rebecca’s sailboat with her corpse still inside, the mystery unravels in short order. Maxim confesses to his bride that Rebecca was actually a despicable and unrepentant slut who threatened to embarrass the de Winters if he divorced her. In a quarrel where Rebecca revealed she was pregnant with another man’s child, who stood to inherit Manderley, Maxim accidentally killed her and attempted to cover up the mishap by sinking her boat with her in it and identifying another dead woman as Rebecca. A trial proceeds where it is proven that Max did not kill her intentionally, but a jealous and implicated Mrs. Danvers – who knew of the pregnancy – goes berserk and burns down Manderley with herself still inside. Our heroine and Maxim renew their love and drive off to places unknown. The end.

FILM NOTES: A classic of the gothic suspense genre filmed in smoky black and white, Rebecca is notable for Joan Fontaine’s portrayal of a completely innocent girl plunked down in a world far too sophisticated for her to fathom. Every crinkle of her nose, gape of her mouth, widening of her eyes, quirk of her brows, and swipe of her hand through her mousy hair betrays her growing dismay, insecurity, and dread. When Maxim comes clean about what has happened, she matures before our eyes into a strong woman who can do anything to support the man she loves.

However good Fontaine is, the film unmistakably belongs to the moments that Dame Judith Anderson appears on screen in all her severe, blank faced, intense weirdness. The scene where she shows the new Mrs. De Winter her former mistress’ bedroom, caressing Rebecca’s fur coat, reminiscing about brushing her hair, passing her hand beneath the dead woman’s transparent nightgown with sick adoration, is classic. Later, after she has manipulated the girl into wearing the very same costume worn by Rebecca to a Manderley masked ball, “Danny” spills all her venom and jealousy, telling Fontaine that she’ll never measure up and she might as well end it all. Trying to coax the bereft girl to jump from the open casement window onto the rocks below, she purrs seductively, “Why don’t you? … why don’t you?” Unsettling, in the extreme.

Hitchcock offers some signature shots, such as the opening “I dreamed I went to Manderley again” sequence, where the camera tracks through an iron gate down an overgrown driveway to the outline of Manderley in the moonlight – masterful. The set and set decoration of Rebecca’s bedroom is breathtaking, from the curtained windows to the gorgeous four poster canopy bed and linens, to the flowers, to the elaborately carved door, to the bureau with its side-sliding lingerie drawers – sumptuous and scrumptious. Hitchcock also uses shadow and light to great effect to add to the gothic anxiety, the sense of those kept in the dark and those whose light is frankly off-kilter, particularly lighting Danvers from underneath to appear more spectral. The shots of Manderley burning with the shadow of Mrs. Danvers in the flames is also pretty fantastic.

Hitchcock keeps to the book’s conceit – our girl has no name at all other than her acquired title of Mrs. De Winter. He also brilliantly never shows us Rebecca – there are no flashbacks and no photographs of her, so her legend grows disproportionately large in the viewers minds, just as it does in the mind of our spooked heroine.

The horror of Mrs. Danvers is broadly alluded to in Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein in the person of Mrs. Blucher the housekeeper, played by Cloris Leachman. So severe and forbidding is Frau Blucher that every time her name is spoken in that comedy, horses whinny in fright – definitely a response to the Mrs. Danvers film iconography.