Ill-Informed Gadfly

Alfred Hitchcock could beat Hollywood at its own game. Of the Hitchcock movies I’ve seen, “Rebecca” is the least personal — it bears producer David O. Selznick’s imprint as much as Hitchcock’s — and, appropriately, it’s the only one to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Even more than now, the Academy in 1940 preferred the stolidly literary over the brazenly cinematic, and it was beholden to the tastes of Middle America — the following year, “How Green Was My Valley” would defeat “Citizen Kane.” “Rebecca” was adapted from a popular 1938 novel by Daphne Du Maurier that owes a big debt to the Brontë sisters. It’s easy to see why Selznick tapped it as his follow-up to “Gone with the Wind.”

Nevertheless, as stolid, literary movies go, “Rebecca” is fantastic. Hitchcock brought his usual flair for creating a tangible sense of place from a mixture of sets, locations, rear projection, models and painted backdrops. Manderley, the sprawling mansion where the dashingly dour Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) brings his skittish new bride (Joan Fontaine), comes to life with all its demons. And Hitchcock, with his characteristic psychological insight, breathes vitality into the familiar tropes of Gothic romance. The unnamed heroine, shy and bookish (Fontaine employs a variety of superficial gestures, like nail-biting and hair-twirling, to sell her awkwardness), gets swept up in the gloomy atmosphere of Manderley, where the late Rebecca, de Winter’s first wife, still manages to lord over everything.

“Rebecca” unfolds in three distinct acts, each of them engrossing. First, we get the furtive romance between de Winter and the heroine — who, in a clunky concession to the novel, remains unnamed — in Monte Carlo, where she’s traveling as a paid companion to an insufferable society lady. We see that de Winter is a man of integrity. While he’s quick to point out the heroine’s flaws — clumsiness, fragility — he’s genuinely kind to her. The second act tracks the heroine’s disastrous attempts to live up to Rebecca’s standard and the torment she suffers at the hands of the demonic Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson, who creeps you out with her placid visage). The third act, surprisingly, is a taut police procedural that puts the audience in a uniquely tense position — we want the cops not to discover the truth. Olivier was never an intuitive film actor — you see the calculation behind his every move — but he still broods masterfully, and he was never easier on the eyes. And Fontaine comes into her own as her character does, abandoning the nervous tics and showing an impressive depth of feeling. Sure, “Rebecca” is an overwrought potboiler — a damn fine one.