“Last Night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.”
In the film Rebecca Joan Fontaine, a paid companion to an obnoxious, bombastic society woman, meets handsome widower, Maxim de Winter (Lawrence Olivier) in Monte Carlo. It appears that the first Mrs. de Winter died in a tragic and mysterious boating accident. An unlikely romance develops between the companion and Maxim, and they marry. After a brief honeymoon, the newyweds return to Maxim’s splendid mansion, Manderley, in Cornwall. The second Mrs. De Winter finds that she is under the shadow of Maxim’s first wife, the paragon–Rebecca.
The interesting thing to me about the film is that Rebecca is just a memory–but such a powerful one. She no longer exists when the film begins and yet her presence is felt throughout the film. This is underscored by the fact that the second Mrs de Winter is never called by her first name, so she just ‘borrows’ Rebecca’s identity, in a sense. By the time the film concludes, I had a very strong sense of Rebecca’s character, and even though the film included no flashback sequences and no photographs of Rebecca, nonetheless she was as strong a presence as Olivier or Fontaine. Everyone who knew her has a different memory–and no two memories of Rebecca are quite the same.
My favourite performance in the film came from George Sanders. He is splendid as roguish, slimy cousin Jack. He drips with malevolent sarcasm, and clearly thinks very little of the simpering new Mrs. de Winter. Another excellent performance comes from Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers. Danvers serves as the prototype of all future evil housekeepers (I particularly thought of Frau Blucher–played by Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein).
The film Rebecca is based on the excellent novel by Daphne Du Maurier. The film remained faithful to the novel–the only criticism I have of the film was that I thought Joan Fontaine played the role with too much emphasis on being a total ninny. Alfred Hitchcock as the director guarantees suspense, and he delivers it again and again in the subtlest of ways. It’s no wonder that Criterion selected this film for DVD.
