Rebecca Blu-ray Review
Hitch hits Hollywood.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 16, 2012
Was it fate or uncharacteristic bad judgment which led Alfred Hitchcock to accept David O. Selznick's entreaties to Hitch
to leave his native England and come to the Promised Land of Hollywood? Hitch had been approached before—several
times in fact—but had managed to resist the lure of untold riches and easy access to the world's biggest stars. What
changed? Was it the considerable dough Selznick promised to throw at the director to make his move palatable? The
fact that Selznick was obviously extremely well connected to Hollywood royalty, and was in fact still a member, if only by
marriage, of one of the industry's ruling elite families? Or was it perhaps the fact that Selznick also promised to launch
his vaunted star making machinery behind Hitchcock himself, making the director one of the very few of his craft to
achieve above the title prominence? Hitchcock was a self-promoter
par excellence, and this fact may have
played into his decision at least as much as the one he told Richard Schickel, who contributes a delightful commentary
to this new Blu-ray release of Hitch's first stateside film, and his first one under the producing aegis of Selznick,
Rebecca: namely, that the director simply wanted more equipment to work with.
Hitch and Selznick ended up
mixing like oil and water, and Ingrid Bergman is on record as stating that cameras magically "broke" whenever Selznick
would imperiously stride onto a shooting stage where Hitch was attempting to make a film. As soon as Selznick left, the
cameras just as magically started working again. Selznick, fueled by massive quantities of Benzedrine, ended up
treating Hitch, somewhat ironically, exactly as Hitch later was quoted as saying actors needed to be handled: as cattle,
being herded wherever they belonged. Hitch had been a huge fish in the rather small pond of the British film industry,
and it must have been a serious wake up call to find himself just another cog in the Hollywood machine, but that
doesn't mean
Rebecca doesn't bear many of the signs of Hitch's nascent mastery.
Rebecca is in some
ways a rather odd property for Hitchcock to want to film (though according to Selznick, the director had in fact
attempted to procure the rights to Daphne DuMaurier's novel while still in Britain, but wasn't able to muster the financial
resources that Selznick had at his beck and call). This sort of neo-modern reimagining of
Jane Eyre had a lot of
the psychological aspects that would come to define later Hitchcock, but it also features a bumbling, halting heroine,
one completely at odds with the usual Hitchcock Ice Goddess, coolly in control of all she surveys. And the purported
mystery at the heart of the story—did Max DeWinter kill his first wife?—is handled with kid gloves, without any real
shock value and in fact with the same sort of sanguine acceptance of motion picture code rules and regulations that
also hampered Hitchcock's somewhat similarly themed
Suspicion.
Rebecca is one of the more hotly debated films in Hitchcock's prolific output, but even those who admire the film (and I'm in that
category)
seem to recognize it's not one of the Master's masterpieces, and the fact is Hitchcock himself is on record in many
interviews as stating that
Rebecca, despite its reputation, not to mention its Best Film Oscar win (something in and of itself proof positive
of
Selznick's political power in Hollywood at that time), wasn't a happy experience for him and there were aspects of the
film he didn't like very much. Hitchcock's early years in Hollywood were a learning experience, certainly not so much in
terms of craft, which he already obviously had in abundance, but more so in the vagaries of who held the reins and
what
could actually be depicted on screen.
Rebecca also had an extremely tumultuous pre-production period (one
which
Schickel gives some insight to in his commentary), with a veritable slew of writers thrown at the project to try to
wrangle
Daphne DuMaurier's novel down to filmable size. That in turn gives the film a kind of schizoid quality at times, one which
Hitch himself seemed to understand going in, as he casts the whole first segment of the film, roughly a half hour or so,
as
a kind of light, drawing room comedy of manners sort of outing before shifting gears rather dramatically once the
nameless
"I" heroine played by Joan Fontaine and her new husband Max DeWinter (Laurence Olivier) return to Max's Gothic
palace,
Manderley. Hitch also simply didn't have the power at that point in his career to cross Selznick, especially with the producer just having
come off the incredible triumph of
Gone With the Wind.
When the film gets into its literally Gothic element, especially after the introduction of the nefarious Mrs. Danvers (Judith
Anderson in an Oscar nominated turn), the film is indeed incredibly spooky and moody, but it's also incredibly
slow
at times, something again that Schickel mentions and which Hitch himself seemed to be aware of. Part of this problem
was due to the fact that Selznick, obviously never a
laissez faire producer, wanted to cram as much of
DuMaurier's novel into the film adaptation as possible. Hitch of course seemed to realize that that would be impossible,
and even more impossible would be the film's central denouement, namely that Max DeWinter was a murderer,
something the production code would certainly not permit, at least within the confines of a romantic thriller where the
character was being portrayed as the putative, if tormented, hero of the piece. That left Hitchcock with the unenviable
task of trying to instill the film with mood, even with less than desirable content. The good news here is that
Rebecca is undeniably
very moody, as Fontaine's character attempts to figure out what happened to Rebecca, Max's first wife, a woman who died under
mysterious circumstances and who still seems to have a ghostly pull on Manderley and her inhabitants, including the creepy housekeeper,
Mrs. Danvers.
Rebecca is a kind of odd film in Hitchcock's
oeuvre and one without any of the director's iconic set pieces.
Instead, we have three really interesting, if at times hyperbolic, performances from Fontaine, Olivier and Anderson.
Fontaine was new to films, and was evidently shunned by the largely British (and very experienced) cast, but that may
have played well into her portrayal of a halting, insecure young woman who finally, late in the film, comes into her own
and more or less takes charge of an unsettling situation. Olivier is an odd hero in this film, one part Heathcliff and
another part Hamlet, a Romantic (with a capital R) hero who is introspective, probably suicidal and certainly depressed.
Max is really kind of a boor throughout much of the film, and Olivier does relatively little to soften that impression.
Anderson chews the scenery with a fair degree of subtlety, all things considered, with a glowering, menacing presence
that has become one of the legendary portrayals in all film (and which might be seen to influence such modern day
depictions as O'Brien in the current smash
Downton Abbey). But there's little of the Hitchcock flair for big,
technically amazing moments (aside, perhaps, from the climactic fire sequence), and those looking for telltale Hitchcock
sequences may be somewhat disappointed in
Rebecca's relatively restrained ambience.
Rebecca Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation
Those expecting a bristling, thrilling experience in
Rebecca may find themselves perplexed, at least on first viewing. This is one of the
slowest of Hitch's films, suitably novelistic considering its source elements, but also a film that seems tonally at odds with itself. This is certainly
an odd Best Picture contender, let alone winner, and Hitch fans can probably provide a laundry list of other films by the Master which might be
better thought of both as films and as representative of Hitchcock's inimitable style. If
Rebecca is approached more as a
Selznick
film, things fall at least a little more into place, as this bears the glossy, deliberate style that Selznick seemed to gravitate toward. Nonetheless,
despite its flaws (and
Rebecca is a flawed film, unfortunately),
Rebecca demands to be seen if for no other reason than that it
gives such a sterling representation of Hitchcock at one of the major crossroads in his career. The Hitchcock-Selznick "marriage" was a stormy,
unhappy one, and astute viewers can almost sense that discontent seeping out even in this, their first collaboration. But even though Hitchcock
really couldn't stand the producer, Selznick at least got the director over here to American soil, where he would go on to create some of his most
iconic masterpieces. Is
Rebecca one of those masterpieces? Probably not, but it has some amazing performances and is full to the brim
with mood. This Blu-ray looks and sounds excellent and it comes
Highly recommended.
