April 19: Rebecca (1940 -- Alfred Hitchcock)

★★★★
What a difference in Hitchcock’s filmmaking two years made.  The Lady Vanishes (1938) has some Hitchcock flourishes but feels conventional; Rebecca (1940) has moved into the suspense, mood and psychology that are familiar to us Hitchcock fans.  It’s not a perfect film, but we certainly get one of the first iconic Hitchcock characters here -- the intense, demented Mrs. Danvers – and a taste of spooky atmosphere.

I’m impressed at how much of a women’s film this is, though I shouldn’t be given Daphne du Maurier's source novel.  Still, credit Hitchcock for creating a film that deals mostly with the heroine’s psychology and for mostly using her point of view to tell the story….and to create much of the suspense in the film.  We don’t know what’s going on in Maxim’s mind because our heroine doesn’t know, and Hitchcock uses this POV limitation to keep us ignorance of an important fact until the big reveal near the end.  Because of the POV, we also share the heroine’s vulnerability as she tries to assume control of Manderley, uncertain of exactly what to do and how to do it.  And we sense her burden of trying to compete with the apparently perfect first Mrs. de Winter.  All of these gender-specific pressures magnify her already-established insecurity and create suspense as we worry whether our fragile point-of-view is going to crack.

Like in The Lady Vanishes, there’s also an interest here in class and in the social differences between the US and Britain.  Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first American film, so you might expect some of that interest to find its way into the film.  The British here are mostly either snooty members of the upper-class or members of the servant class that want their employers to, in fact, be snooty upper-class.  There’s a good case to be made for saying that Mrs. Danvers’ central conflict is that she can’t deal with not having the security of a dominating better to serve; Danvers’ breakdown occurs because the class structure she depends on for her very identity is disrupted when the lower-class American becomes the mistress of Manderley.

The same disruption of class roles leads to the heroine’s near breakdown, too.  When Maxim meets the soon-to-be second Mrs. de Winter, the girl is a companion to a snooty, upper-class American woman, and there’s clearly a parallel between the situations of the heroine and Mrs. Danvers.  Both occupy socially subordinate roles as helpers to other upper-class women.  When the heroine breaks that social hierarchy by marrying Maxim, her former employer says the upstart will never succeed, Mrs. Danvers can’t bring herself to accept the substitute, and the heroine herself comes to believe she can’t function in her new social role.  And all of this turmoil comes about from the sincere, innocent love that the American has for her husband, an introduction of the American/British theme.

It isn’t just love that gets the heroine through her trials, though.  Our lead has a lot of good ole American spunk, and when she gets pushed too far, she shoves her sleeves up and gets to work.  She still makes a couple of stumbles, like the mistake at the costume party, but it’s American sincerity and determination that get her through her social crisis as Rebecca moves beyond her storyline to deal with more British upper-class perfidy. 

I find the film’s change in focus at that point its biggest flaw, though.  Rebecca focusses on the heroine’s struggle for ¾ the length of the film, and when it seems she’s finally dealt with her situation, the movie suddenly veers off into an investigation/courtroom detour before returning to the effects of the heroine’s achievement.  The detour describes both the downside (lover) and the upside (constable) of the British, but it’s a digression from the POV and conflict we’d been following.  Of course, when the film eventually returns to Manderley, it’s hard not to see some symbolism in the destruction of the manor house, which had been governed so much by the British mores.

As much as the plot and characters, George Barnes’ cinematography plays a role in making Rebecca the unique work it is.  Barnes creates the vast, open rooms of Manderley, and he photographs the ample smoke that contributes so much to the space and mystery in the film.  Close-ups evoke intimacy or tension, depending on who is in the frame, and looming shadows with low-angle cameras add an emotional dimension to the dialogue and situation.  Sound and editing often reinforce the visuals, too, as when the Mrs. Danvers tries to get the heroine to jump from a window and the camera suddenly cuts several times from a frame of the two women to the heroine’s subjective POV staring down at the ground from the windown.  Likewise when editing and sound add to the menace in the images of the waves during the storm.

Rebecca is a great advance in Hitchcock’s film language.  The movie has some of the same elements as his earlier work, but it refines these elements, adds to them, and combines them in such a way that we begin to see the emergence here of what we can recognize as the signature of a Hitchcock film.