Rebecca is Alfred Hitchcock’s lovingly crafted ghost story, a haunted house suspense thriller where the ghost is Rebecca herself. She drowned last year off the coast of her impressively gothic mansion, Manderley. A respectable amount of time later, Rebeca’s husband, Maxim DeWinter (Lawrence Olivier) is vacationing in Monte Carlo when he meets an unnamed girl (Joan Fontaine), a paid traveling companion whom he falls in love with over the course of a few weeks. They marry, and Joan Fontaine becomes known as “the second Mrs. DeWinter;” the only name she’ll earn.
Buy Rebecca (The Criterion Collection) Blu-rayReturning to Manderley after their honeymoon, Maxim is usually morose and brooding. The slightest annoyance can set him off. He seems a man devastated by the death of his perfect wife, and the second Mrs. DeWinter often feels dejected and cowers at every little slight.
The daily operations are run by the head maid, Rebecca’s old confidant, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson). Mrs. Danvers picks at everything the second Mrs. DeWinter does. The second Mrs. DeWinter has none of the faux charm, the iron fist, the narcissistic power that Rebecca was known to lay out for every family member, every “friend.”
Mrs. Danvers plays with the second Mrs. DeWinter like the toy she tends to act like. Danvers gives hints that it might be nice to have a costume ball like they did in Rebecca’s day. The second Mrs. DeWinter is told she should look at the portraits of long lost relatives that line the great hall. She is pushed toward one portrait in particular, not knowing Rebecca wore the exact same gown at the last costume ball, days before her death.
When the second Mrs. DeWinter glides down the stairs in Rebecca’s dress, Maxim is furious and sends her away. Mrs. Danvers walks the second Mrs. DeWinter to a bedroom window and nearly convinces her to jump when an alarm sounds. A ship has sunk in the fog, and during rescue attempts, a second boat is found with a body in it. Rebecca’s boat; Rebecca’s body.
Rebecca takes a turn for the last third of the movie as it shifts away from gothic romance to police procedural. Maxim is suspected of the murder of Rebecca while some suspect she committed suicide. The second Mrs. DeWinter shows her full support for Maxim, and it is this late in the film that they finally begin to fall deeply in love.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca is a nearly perfect film; the only real complaint might be that it runs a tad too long. The screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison was based on the novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier and quite deftly runs circles around the censors of the day. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine are wonderfully charming, and angry, and scared, and just plain embody the characters throughout. The true glory of the story comes through in that the “real” antagonist, the cause of most of the problems, doesn’t appear in a single scene; however, Rebecca the character, and Rebecca the film, cast a long, long shadow even today.
