![]() ![]() She's obviously too beautiful to be the mousy, dowdy wallflower the character demands, but by hunching her shoulders and darting her eyes, by playing up the clumsiness and never acknowledging her own beauty, she convinces. He supplies the danger (though in the novel, the fact that Mrs de Winter conspires to conceal Rebecca's murder shows how she has been corrupted by her awful marriage), and she is our representative: the one who shows how we might fare transplanted into minor aristocracy. ![]() It's Fontaine's film, really, rather than Olivier's. And, of course, that critical, crippling moment when Fontaine descends the grand staircase to the Manderley masquerade ball, having been tricked by Mrs Danvers into wearing a replica of one of Rebecca's old gowns. Reliant though the film is on dialogue, Hitchcock throws in those inimitable visual touches, too: Max staring over the cliffs to the Mediterranean, the sea swirling sickeningly beneath him, showing us his death wish his sister explaining to the second Mrs de Winter how much Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca, and the screen fading to black behind Fontaine's face, a startling representation of the fall in your stomach when you hear something you have dreaded. Clumsy it might have been, but because that plotline is tacked on at the end, it doesn't interfere with the mighty central pillar of the film: the desperate, suffocating, co-dependent relationships of Mr and Mrs de Winter, Mrs Danvers and Rebecca. The Hollywood Production Code, however, could not allow a murderer to escape unpunished and so an accidental death had to be engineered. Du Maurier made Max de Winter a murderer: he killed Rebecca in rage at her affairs (feminist readings of the story posit her as its heroine any modern reader will view her sympathetically the more they see of her husband). The only significant departure from the novel was unavoidable. There she meets de Winter, a dark and brooding widower, prone to staring moodily over cliff edges and contemplating death.Īfter a whirlwind romance – much of which consists of him admonishing her in tones that would see any modern man dumped on the spot (his proposal: "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool") – they marry and return to his ancestral home, where Rebecca's old personal maid, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson, portraying a Miss Gulch of the servant class), makes the second Mrs de Winter's life a misery. The romantic might view Laurence Olivier's Max de Winter as someone haunted by his past the realist would see him as someone haunted only by his inability to control his past, specifically his titular deceased wife, and so he alights upon Joan Fontaine's gauche, clumsy (and nameless) gentlewoman's companion as a wife who will give him no trouble.īriefly, Fontaine has accompanied the ghastly Mrs Van Hopper (Florence Bates) to Monte Carlo as her paid companion. Rebecca is a film about abusive relationships, and the way power might shift within them – and, most unusually, even for its time – its hero is the worst of the abusers. ![]()
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