Rebecca

If you’re here reading this, then you are probably like me and consider yourself a cinema lover or film fan. You’ll be able to reel off a list of your favourite films and under-rated sleepers and wax lyrical about certain transcendent moments in otherwise terrible movies.

You’ll also have a list of those movies broadly deemed to be classics which you have never seen and feel somewhat embarrassed about it. I do. But here, in Shameful, I’m doing something about it.

As is my style, I headed over to iMDB and clicked on the button marked ‘Top 250’. Hardly a scientific approach, I concede, but here we are. I scanned down the list: I’ve seen the top 26 films on it. I estimate I’ve seen probably half of them in total, which means I have about a hundred films to play with, once I account for the ones I cannot economically source, or which are unavailable with English subs.

I begin with an Alfred Hitchcock movie, from 1940, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier. I begin with Rebecca.

As it happens, the novel is as well regarded as the movie. And I’ve read Rebecca and while I didn’t love its slow, brooding nature – to my modern tastes, it spends too much time getting to the point – when it gets to the sharp end, it is fantastic. The quality of Du Maurier’s prose and the curious nature of the upper echelons of British society kept me engaged enough to work my way through the build-up to, well, a series of reveals and twists which recontextualise everything.

Since Shameful is not intended to be an in-depth exploration of how and why films fail or become ignored, any description of the plot will be brief and spoiler-free. After all, these are films we film-lovers are supposed to be watching, right?

Rebecca is the story of a never-named young woman (Joan Fontaine), who happens upon a seemingly suicidal older man (Laurence Olivier) atop the cliffs in Monte Carlo. As it happens, they are both staying at the same hotel: the young woman is the paid companion of the boisterous Mrs Van Hopper, and the man is the widowed Maxim de Winter, who is said to be still mourning his wife, the glamorous and gorgeous Rebecca. De Winter takes an interest in the young lady, even if it is quite superior in tone and even patronising in manner, and she falls in love with him. When Mrs Van Hopper decides to leave Monte Carlo, the young lady is devastated until Maxim suddenly proposes marriage, which is accepted, to the disbelief of Mrs Van Hopper.

Off the bride and groom go to Manderley, a huge and rambling mansion on the coast of Cornwall. The new Mrs de Winter finds herself utterly lost in both her new marriage to a somewhat cold and distant husband, and in her new role as the mistress of Manderley. After all, when the housekeeper, the ever-looming and disapproving Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) treats her with disdain for trying to usurp the dead Rebecca, the new Mrs de Winter becomes more and more lost and commits error after error, and something in her husband’s manner and his history with Rebecca simply doesn’t add up, and what's this odd chap named Favell doing...?

Does Rebecca deserve a place in a top 250 movies list? Yeah, almost certainly.

It’s Hitchcock’s first Hollywood production, for one thing, and he was nominated for Best Director. It won Best Picture. Hitchcock’s management of his actors is first-rate. Let’s start there.

While by no means Olivier’s first picture, here he is the youngest I’ve ever seen him and in terms of pure emotional control, Olivier is masterful. We don’t really get haunted from him, not in terms of expression, but I suspect a 1930s English gentleman would not allow others to see him showing that emotion. Stiff upper lip, and all that, and here Olivier’s lip is superlatively stiff. This forces him to emote almost entirely through voice, and Olivier is more than up to the task. He has a monologue later in the movie which would not work if the performer added even a drop more emotion to it – you’ll know it when you hear it and see it, as Hitchcock’s use of the camera is magical during it. For all of Maxim’s paternalizing attitude towards his young wife, Olivier does bring him a gravity and steeliness necessary for one the big twists to be believable. He's an uptight bully, and he needs to be, and Olivier has the chops to play it.

But Olivier alone could not carry the movie, since the story does not belong to Maxim. In truth, it belongs to the young Mrs de Winter. Fontaine plays the character with no little skill, but the weight of the melodrama falls on her character, and she doesn’t quite emerge fully from it. Perhaps that is a good thing: Rebecca is a gothic romance (?) thriller (at least at the end), and it is via Fontaine we enter the alien world of the de Winters, through which Rebecca passes as a very substantial ghost. The young wife is an outsider and Fontaine succeeds in selling this. By modern standards, the wife is almost impossibly naïve, and so the romance portion of the story doesn’t land for me. But Fontaine is well able to transmit the stress her character is under, and Manderley itself looms magnificently and oppressively, and the gothic aspect of the movie still holds up.

The secondary characters are all played with magnificent verve. I adored the skill with which Florence Bates brings the pompous Mrs Van Hopper to oversized life. There’s something about the knowing priggishness of the performance which meshes so well with Olivier’s control and Fontaine’s awkwardness. Further, the film would not work at all without the iciness of Anderson’s Mrs Danvers. Since Rebecca is never seen in the flesh, all of her imprimatur must be transferred into her avatar, Mrs Danvers, and given the quality of Anderson’s performance, it comes as no surprise that there are references to Mrs Danvers in other books and movies. Certainly, it is Anderson's performance which made Mrs Danvers into an icon.

The final notable minor character is that of Favell, played by George Sanders, a British character actor with the plummiest of accents. Sanders plays magnificently off both Fontaine, where his oiliness contrasts perfectly with her plainness, and off Olivier. Maxim’s strait-laced staidness sparks against Favell’s loucheness and corruption so very effectively. I must confess to being unaware of Sanders’s career until I found out he voiced Shere Khan in the animated Jungle Book, and indeed Favell shares that tiger’s predatory aspect, all conveyed through voice.

The film still sags a little under the demands of how Du Maurier sets it up. If you don’t buy into the romance aspect of it, as I didn’t, then the relationship between Maxim and his bride will seem irrational. What does Maxim see in the very young, very inexperienced woman he marries? Perhaps those two qualities in contrast to Rebecca. The bride’s struggles with the long shadow cast by Rebecca over her husband and Manderley works better, but without the villainousness of Mrs Danvers, the story could not work. And so I persisted with the movie, borne not by the strength of the prose but instead by the strength of the performances and the assuredness of the cinematography, all the way up to the critical moment when Maxim finally drops the other shoe and we get our quite extended third act.

It's worth the wait. I won’t spoil it.

Watching the film in 2025, it was fun to see how and where the special effects were applied. Yes, I spotted the shot featuring the model of Manderley, and I appreciated how epic the sweep of it was. No helicopters in 1939, never mind drones. I chuckled at all of the ‘outdoor’ scenes, where Olivier and Fontaine have a beach or Monte Carlo projected behind them. The number of location shots in this movie are vanishingly small and stand out quite noticeably. Not a problem at all, but interesting to spot them so plainly.

Yes, the sets are magnificent, and the models gorgeous. The soundtrack, though, that I did not appreciate. It possesses a bombast you do not experience in modern cinema and I found it rather intrusive. But it doesn’t matter that much. Rebecca sets out to be a gothic chiller, and it very much succeeds in the final act. There is so much to enjoy, be it Hitchcock’s management of pace or camera or actors, or the deliciousness of the third act. Very much worth watching, and now I can tick it off my list.