Rebecca (1940)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, George Sanders, Florence Bates, Reginald Denny, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Leonard Carey, C. Aubrey Smith, Edward Fielding.

Terrific Hitchcock melodrama in the Gothic tradition details a haunting love triangle where one of the parties is merely a memory (or ghost). Young and unfledged Fontaine is swept into a romance with a well-bred widower (Olivier, almost as harsh and brooding here as he was in the previous year’s Wuthering Heights); he marries her and takes her home to his seaside mansion, Manderley, but the “second Mrs. de Winter” shrinks in the long shadow of the late original: Rebecca. The director coaxes maximum suspense out of the psychological thriller aspects of Daphne du Maurier’s celebrated novel, exercising restraint toward the more lurid elements without forgoing emphasis on the severe lighting and brackish textures of the dense atmosphere; offbeat subtextual teases only strengthen its spell, especially in terms of the obsessions of cold, rigid housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Anderson), and the twisted association she forges with Fontaine. The tension is relieved a tad too much in the final act, but it gives Sanders (as Rebecca’s former lover) a chance to take over, and when is his cutting cadence and leonine purr not welcome? Hitch’s first American production, and another victory on Oscar night for über-producer David O. Selznick, which netted him a statuette for Best Picture, as well as one for George Barnes’ photography (it’s the last time to date that a movie would win Best Picture without at least one other major award to go along with it—directing, writing, and/or acting). Remade in 2020.

87/100