Hitchcock's Best Picture Winner is Slow, but Rightly Revered
Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca is probably best remembered for being his only film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It's also his first American film, and is based on the popular book of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. Though perhaps rightly not considered a Hitchcock classic in the mold of North by Northwest or Vertigo, Rebecca is still filled with strong performances and masterful filmmaking. It's a slow-burn tale that is eerie in a classically Hitchcockian sense, and is fully engaging as a mystery emerges.
The suspense mounts, slow though it may be, and the film proves to be about paranoia as the second wife (Joan Fontaine) of English aristocrat Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) contends with the all but literal, physical presence of Maxim's first wife, the adored, beautiful Rebecca. The staff of the sprawling Manderley estate loved the first Mrs. de Winter, no more so than the imposing housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who keeps the house as her lady had. The late Rebecca's influence on the house—from decor to embroidered dinner napkins—remains an omnipresent specter.
Fontaine, whose character is foreign to leading such a high-class life, inhabits her role well. She's as awed and unnerved by Rebecca's home as we are, and she—along with Anderson's creepy yet sincere performance—make the film engaging when its story is still playing things close to the vest by keeping its mystery vague. Olivier is also a bright spot as a man trying to enjoy newlywed bliss, though he retains an undercurrent of darkness that makes him a joy to watch as the details of Rebecca's death come to light.
Rebecca doesn't provide Hitchcock with a set piece moment akin to Cary Grant clinging to Mount Rushmore or James Stewart watching Grace Kelly in a murderer's apartment, but the way he creates the hair-raising atmosphere of Manderley is masterful. When Maxim tells his wife to avoid a certain wing of the house, Beauty and the Beast springs to mind with its musty, spooky west wing. But Manderley isn't inherently scary; it's a big country house, not unlike that in Sabrina. It's also well maintained. Not even Rebecca's old, unused master bedroom—the kind you'd expect from royalty—is traditionally imposing. Hitchcock and cinematographer George Barnes even go so far as to fill the space with light, revealing it to be an absolutely beautiful, serene place in the house.
But it's still Rebecca's, and Hitchcock never for a second lets us forget that Mr. and Mrs. de Winter are living in the world of character whom we neither see nor hear once. She could almost be seen as a precursor to Norman Bates' mother in Psycho.
Rebecca is certainly a film of its time, and won't be for everyone. It takes a good while to arrive at any true revelations about Maxim and Rebecca, and when that mystery begins to develop into something tangible—beyond Fontaine's character's curiosity about Rebecca—it's clear that everything that precedes it is careful stage-setting by Hitchcock. What was a moderately tense drawing room character drama about marriage becomes a more absorbing, thrilling experience. Fontaine, Olivier, and Anderson make their characters engaging to watch before the story fully opens up, and Hitchcock cannily and beautifully photographs them and Manderley without ever letting the people onscreen or in the audience get complacent. Rebecca is a measured suspense film, and it rightly deserves to be revered, even if to the masses it might look more like a Hitchcock also-ran than a classic.