“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Thus, from Daphne du Maurier’s enormously popular 1938 novel, begins the only film by Alfred Hitchcock to be awarded a best-picture Oscar. The words are uttered by a disembodied voice belonging to the young heroine whom we know only by the name, after her marriage, as “the second Mrs. de Winter.” What we see are visuals corresponding to her dream: beginning with the moon in a cloudy nighttime sky, her mind’s journey back to her husband’s mansion in Cornwall, now a “desolate shell” from the fire that destroyed it. “We can never go to Manderley again. That much is certain.”
Saddled with a monomaniacal producer who had little artistic judgment,* and stricken besides with his own indifference toward the novel’s breathless “romantic” material, Hitchcock nevertheless made memorable his first Hollywood film. It’s a gorgeous thing—not a work of art, surely, but a captivating and haunting entertainment very artfully done. It’s certainly a much better film than the last one he made in England before heading to the U.S., Jamaica Inn (1939), also based on a novel by du Maurier, and it’s probably also better than The Birds (1962), based on a story of hers. But however shallow overall The Birds may be, some of Hitchcock’s gloomy apocalyptic imagery in it is hard to shake off.
Born in London in 1907, du Maurier first visited Cornwall, in southwest England, when she was twenty. Enthralled by the landscape, including the coast, she felt an immediate spiritual connection. Somehow, she decided then and there that she would be a novelist. Rebecca is one of many books of hers set there, and indeed she herself chose to live there, somewhat reclusively, for most of her life. She died there in 1989.
Everyone knows the story.** An orphan, the shy paid companion of a coarse, domineering wealthy older woman, comes across an aristocratic, quite arrogant, seemingly suicidal widower, George Fortescu Maximillian de Winter—“Maxim”—in Monte Carlo. Her freshness and innocence redeem his troubled, unhappy state, and each falls in love with the other. They marry. She is awestruck by the ancestral de Winter home, where she feels quite unprepared to assume the role of lady of the manor. Everywhere there are reminders of her predecessor, the stylish Rebecca, the first Mrs. de Winter, who died. From the start, she worries she can’t compete with Maxim’s memory of someone who, according to her former employer, “he simply adored.” Although other members of the staff and friends and family of Maxim’s try to help her adjust to her daunting new tasks and surroundings, Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, despises her for taking her mistress’s place; “Danny” truly adored the first Mrs. de Winter. Gathering strength, Maxim’s wife eventually tells the housekeeper, “I’m Mrs. de Winter now.” However, her marriage threatens to shatter when Rebecca’s drowned corpse washes up on shore. (Who, then, was the soul who was buried as Rebecca?) Maxim informs his wife that she has been mistaken: he didn’t love Rebecca—he hated her; their marriage was a sham to which, blackmailed by her, he clung for the sake of family pride. Rebecca’s favorite cousin, a car salesman named Jack Favell, casts suspicion on Maxim as being Rebecca’s killer. But secrets are exposed, and their exposure results in Danny’s going mad and burning down the mansion. Fire consumes the estate that represents the frosty name of de Winter.
No wonder reviewers noted a resemblance between the plot of her book and that of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, written nearly a hundred years earlier. But whereas Brontë’s novel is probing and profound, du Maurier’s is fanciful and facile. Although atmospheric, Rebecca is psychologically thin. What could Hitchcock possibly make of such spurious material?
For one thing, his imagination seized on Maxim’s pessimistic, almost fatalistic declaration that it was “too late” for his and his young wife’s happiness—a death-knell phrase that would echo in the church bell tower in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a much darker and more serious work about a missed opportunity for love. (Apologists for du Maurier also credit this film to du Maurier’s sensibility and her influence on Hitchcock, whether he cared to admit it. This, of course, is silly.) Moreover, with the help of George Barnes’s eerily lovely, Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography and Franz Waxman’s lush music, Hitchcock conjured even more “atmosphere” than the novel does. Indeed, prior to Vertigo again, Rebecca is the Hitchcock film that throughout—not just at the beginning—most suggests a dream.
The highly resourceful script by playwright Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison is a far better piece of writing than is du Maurier’s book. (Du Maurier did improve. The House on the Strand, 1968, is of some interest.) It is acted to the hilt. Laurence Olivier is at least better than subsequent Maxims have been, and he is especially good at combining roughness and tenderness in his love scenes with Joan Fontaine, who plays his wife. (Having wanted the part to go to Vivien Leigh, Olivier did not, apparently, treat his twenty-year-old co-star too nicely offscreen.) His paradoxical Maxim is a gentle-hearted man with a temper like a whip. Fontaine is stunning—brilliant. She captures the sweetness and easily intimidated nature of the girl early on while laying the groundwork for the later maturing of the character as Maxim’s wife pulls together with her spouse to confront the legal charges against him. Fontaine’s is one of the most glowing, convincing and compelling instances of character-growth in a Hollywood film; at year’s end the National Board of Review named it one of the year’s best performances. George Sanders as Favell is nasty slime, and Judith Anderson—the Australian actress who had played Hamlet on stage—makes Mrs. Danvers an increasingly psychotic hoot. But the best member of the large supporting cast, surely, is Reginald Denny as Frank Crawley, Maxim’s very guilty best friend. (Crawley and Rebecca had been lovers.) One looks for nuances in film acting, interesting and insightful touches that seem to expand the script. Denny’s performance consists almost wholly of nuances.
So long as one doesn’t take Rebecca too seriously, one can have great fun with it—and one can keep having fun through repeated viewings of it. Few films prove better for insomniac viewing at home.
* One of producer David O. Selznick’s assinine suggestions to Hitchcock is that the film should end with the house-burning that Mrs. Danvers started forming in the sky a gigantic “R” of smoke—“R” for Rebecca.
** Well, maybe not the whole story of the book: Once, writing about the novel, but unaware that the Hollywood production code required a different resolution than du Maurier’s, a student of mine credited the book with events that occur only in the film!
Tags: Hitchcock, Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier
