A young woman falls in love with the troubled Maxim DeWinter when they meet in Monte Carlo. They marry and he takes her to Manderley, his mansion in Cornwall. Once there however, she is overcome at every turn by the ghostly shadow of Rebecca, De Winter's first wife, who drowned under mysterious circumstances a year before.
Hitchcock's first American film is a gorgeous adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's classic novel, sumptuously produced by David O. Selznick. I'm not generally a fan of classical romantic fiction, but Rebecca is most definitely an exception; not only does it have several great plot-twists but the central character is brilliantly conceived and entirely sympathetic, and the brooding Gothic atmosphere of both Manderley and Rebecca confine the drama within a tremendously chilling ghost story. The cast are all first-rate but both Fontaine and Anderson give career-defining performances. Fontaine is tremendous - beautiful and passionate in an earthy, selfless way that fits her nameless character perfectly, whilst Anderson, as the villainous Mrs Danvers, is so good that she single-handedly launched a standard movie stock-character (the over-zealous housekeeper) in hundreds of subsequent films. This was the movie which allowed Hitchcock to paint on a really huge canvas, and he creates a powerful sense of dread - you can almost feel Rebecca's presence in the film. There's a stunning shot of Mrs Danvers opening some drapes, where he suddenly freezes the frame and dissolves to the next scene, epitomising the essence of the story - a place frozen in time, where nobody can move forward or shake themselves free of the past, and everything is stagnating. For my money this is the best Gothic romance ever filmed; a brilliantly directed movie of a tremendous book.
Hitchcock's first American film is a gorgeous adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's classic novel, sumptuously produced by David O. Selznick. I'm not generally a fan of classical romantic fiction, but Rebecca is most definitely an exception; not only does it have several great plot-twists but the central character is brilliantly conceived and entirely sympathetic, and the brooding Gothic atmosphere of both Manderley and Rebecca confine the drama within a tremendously chilling ghost story. The cast are all first-rate but both Fontaine and Anderson give career-defining performances. Fontaine is tremendous - beautiful and passionate in an earthy, selfless way that fits her nameless character perfectly, whilst Anderson, as the villainous Mrs Danvers, is so good that she single-handedly launched a standard movie stock-character (the over-zealous housekeeper) in hundreds of subsequent films. This was the movie which allowed Hitchcock to paint on a really huge canvas, and he creates a powerful sense of dread - you can almost feel Rebecca's presence in the film. There's a stunning shot of Mrs Danvers opening some drapes, where he suddenly freezes the frame and dissolves to the next scene, epitomising the essence of the story - a place frozen in time, where nobody can move forward or shake themselves free of the past, and everything is stagnating. For my money this is the best Gothic romance ever filmed; a brilliantly directed movie of a tremendous book.