Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940, USA, 130 mins
Cast: Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson, Nigel Bruce
Review by Peter Fraser
Last night, I dreamt that I saw Rebecca again. It seemed to me that I stood beside the doors leading into the cinema auditorium, and for a while, I could not enter, for the way was barred to me by a life-size cardboard cut-out advertising Superman Returns.
Or something like that. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, then you might presume that Rebecca was the heroine of Daphne du Maurier’s enduring Gothic romance. In a sense, she’s the central character, because her influence pervades the story and affects everyone else, but because she is already dead she makes no appearance. Rebecca became Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film after his illustrious early career in Britain. Its Gothicism, and its melodrama, foreshadowed later Hitchcock films, not least Psycho and Under Capricorn, and he would go on to make another du Maurier adaptation with The Birds. It was in many ways an appropriate film for a director who was trying both to live up to, and live down, his past, creating an American movie from British material.
Appropriate because, like any good ghost story, Rebecca is about how the past can haunt the present and the dead can make demands of the living. In Monte Carlo, Joan Fontaine’s nameless lady’s companion encounters Laurence Olivier’s wealthy widower, Maxim de Winter. After a brisk romance, and a stern injunction from de Winter to marry him, Fontaine finds herself as Mrs de Winter, ensconced in the sepulchral halls of her husband’s mansion, Manderley. Disdainfully treated by the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers (the excellent Judith Anderson), Fontaine learns of a previous Mrs de Winter, Rebecca, who was revered by all, not least Mrs Danvers, and who died mysteriously.
Rebecca has a wonderful texture, with marvellous cinematography and set design, that through its excellence transcends the clichéd trope of the musty and shadowy haunted house simply because it has rarely been more effectively conveyed. The contrast between the airy sunshine of Monte Carlo and the suffocating gloom of Manderley helps tremendously and the actors acquit themselves very well. Even Olivier’s slightly embalmed performance seems appropriate for a guilt-stricken widower still trapped in the past; his grief the prime cause of the stultifying malaise that his new wife hopes to cure.
Psychologically interesting, if now rather well-worn, du Maurier’s story owes an obvious debt to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, which in turn was influenced by the archaic myth of Bluebeard, whose latest wife penetrates his secret room to discover the chopped-up remains of his previous wives. With such a lineage, Rebecca is resonant with female anxieties about men and other women, and what is Joan Fontaine if not a conflicted woman in a patriarchal society who loves her husband but wonders guiltily, about how he treated his previous wife, and fearfully, about what he might do to her. Such anxieties also manifest themselves in The Birds and - along with Suspicion, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt and others - it seems that Hitchcock strongly identified with them, reaching his apogee as a transsexual director in the cross-dressing figure of Norman Bates. As has been well-documented, the root of this, perhaps, was his over-identification with his mother. Probably more unusual in Hitchcock’s oeuvre are Fontaine’s implicit anxieties about her social class compared to the faintly aristocratic Rebecca. It is here that we may see Hitchcock’s cross-over from a British cinema in which class was extremely prominent - if not generally the ostensible subject - to an apparently classless Americana.
To watch a re-release like Rebecca (to see Maxim de Winter grieving again, to observe Fontaine’s Mrs de Winter suspect him of murder again, to consider the film’s infernal ending again) is to be given some inkling of the remorseless wheel of fate and the possible immutability of historical destinies. As Marx pronounced, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce and it was of course this that influenced the weirdly comedic scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It lends even the most po-faced ghost story like Rebecca an air of incipient melodrama, the sense that everyone is reacting to things for the nth time, unaware and unable to break from their eternal recurrence.
That, if you like, is the wide-angle view rather than the close-up, and Hitchcock, with his broad and perverted sense of humour, always favoured both. The wide angle became an expansive grin, while his close-ups resemble nothing so much as lips puckered in childish delight. If the re-release can be radical, by salvaging a film unfairly neglected, or ahead of its time and thus challenging the canon, it is more often conservative, reviving an acknowledged masterpiece in a form of ancestor worship. In Rebecca, Fontaine - as with many artists - is tormented by the anxiety of her ancestor’s influence and, as an audience, we find ourselves again in Hitchcock’s grip reaching from beyond the grave. I invite you, like the second wife of Maxim de Winter, to wander again in the darkened halls of Hitchcock’s interpretation of Daphne de Maurier’s perennially popular novel.
Discuss this film here
|
