Production
- Blockbuster: über-producer David O. Selznick’s big budget follow-up to Gone with the Wind
- To helm the successor to the biggest film of all time, he imported Britain’s biggest director
- But Hitch’s first US movie has only one American in main cast – depicted with utter disdain!
- His next project was to be an account of the Titanic disaster but it was ultimately unproduced
- Darkly daring: Sex, incest, lesbian longing, murder (diluted by censorship) and illicit sea burial
- A proto-feminist rites-of-passage tale dressed up as murder mystery that still resonates today
- Selznick’s attention to detail saw to the recreation of an actual gothic pile and English village
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
Rebecca: Writing on a Classic; Collectors Guide, Part 2: Production, 3: Home video, 4: 1956 re-release and bootlegs, 5: Soundtrack and radio, 6: Remakes
Joan Fontaine as our nameless, unwitting, maliciously misguided heroine
Contents
American but British
British stars: oil painting (uncut) by Bradshaw Crandell, after this photo. Joan Fontaine was cast against Laurence Olivier’s wishes, as his wife Vivien Leigh vied for the part.
Rebecca: Rows, rivalries and a movie classic – Tim Robey | Florence Bates: Lady with Nine Lives! – Richard Ames
Well, for what is ostensibly Hitch’s first American movie, Rebecca isn’t very. American, that is. Aside from Selznick, its American producer-financier, it’s based on a novel by a British author, set initially on the French Riviera and then in England, and three of the four writers who adapted it for the screen were Brits, including Joan Harrison. The cast consists almost entirely of British actors with the only notable exceptions being Judith Anderson as the redoubtable Mrs. Danvers (but she’s from Australia so an honorary Brit!) and Texas-born Florence Bates, who plays Mrs. Edythe Van Hopper. Folk occasionally speculate what became of Mr. Danvers but it’s long been the convention for head housekeepers of large estates to be referred to as “Mrs.” regardless of their marital status, so it’s safe to assume our antagonist is unhitched as well as unhinged and her sapphic devotion is complete.
The ageing socialite Van Hopper is a loud, obnoxious stereotype who not-so subtly tries to pimp her young charge out to the eligible Mr. de Winter. Just what was Hitch trying to imply about our stateside cousins, one wonders? Incidentally, Bates didn’t begin her acting career until her late 30s, having qualified as one of the first women lawyers in Texas in 1914 at the age of 26. Incredibly, Rebecca was her first film, apart from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part as an uncredited extra in obscure Universal B-movie The Man in Blue (1937). Hitch, of course, maintained his habit of casting Brits throughout his ‘American’ years…
- Rebecca: 80 Years Later – Kim Vertue
- Mr and Mrs de Winter – David Cairns
In a lovely example of art imitating art, the prospective second Mrs. de Winter, otherwise known as “I”, tells Maxim de Winter of how her deceased father loved to paint the same tree over and over again. “He had a theory that if you should find one perfect thing or place or person, you should stick to it.” Similarly, my friend, Nottingham-based artist Paul Searson, has been repeatedly depicting the Major Oak, Robin Hood’s legendary Sherwood Forest hideout, in various different media and seasons for over 30 years.
- Fontaine Flowers: Rebecca and Suspicion – Farran Smith Nehme
- Shaping the look of Rebecca – Caroline Young, Hitchcock’s Heroines (2018)
- Rebecca and Joan Fontaine in Fan Magazines – Melodrama Research Group
- “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?”: Rebecca – Normma
“I made about seven tests for Rebecca. Everybody tested for it. Loretta Young, Margaret Sullavan, Vivien Leigh, Susan Hayward, Anne Baxter, you name her. [Selznick even asked her sister Olivia, who refused.] Supposedly, [Alfred Hitchcock] saw one of my tests and said, “This is the only one”. I think the word he used to describe what set me apart was ‘vulnerability’. Also, I was not very well-known and producer David O. Selznick saw the chance for star-budding. And may I say he also saw the chance to put me under contract for serf’s wages.” – Joan Fontaine
- No Bed of Roses: An Autobiography (1978) – Joan Fontaine
- Sisters: The Story of Olivia and Joan (1984) – Charles Higham
- Joan Fontaine: A Bio-Bibliography (1994) – Marsha L. Beeman
- Joan Fontaine Photo Gallery: A Helluva Life (2016) – Brenda J. Mills
Titanic sunk
1938: When Hitchcock first came to Hollywood – Henry K. Miller
Rebecca as we know it might never have been though, instead directed by someone else as explained by film historian Charles Barr, author of numerous renowned books and monographs on Hitch. Selznick was originally pushing for Hitch’s first Hollywood project to be a film based on the Titanic disaster but it ultimately went unrealised. Hitch initially humoured Selznick but all along was working to secure Rebecca for himself. A notoriously sarcastic pronouncement on his enthusiasm for the project was recounted in Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: “Oh, yes,” he told a New York reporter, “I’ve had experience with icebergs. Don’t forget, I directed Madeleine Carroll!”
- The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976)/The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of AH (1983) – Donald Spoto
Around the same time, it was reported Hitch would also direct for Selznick an adaptation of British author Charles Langbridge Morgan’s first play, The Flashing Stream (1938). Carole Lombard, who would star in Hitch’s third American feature, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, was tapped to lead but in the event the play only appeared as a handful of transatlantic TV movies.
Summary of Discussion on Rebecca – Melodrama Research Group
Existential essays
Consternation: “I” finds out the hard way it’s better to be yourself and not try to imitate others. Her lovely dress was recycled from Gone with the Wind and her hat sold in June 2018 for $1,440.
- A Ghost Story Without a Ghost – Ali Arikan
- Iconography and Caricature in Rebecca – Sandra Shevey
- Rebecca: Structural analysis of the film – Donald Ranvaud
- Rebecca: Power, Beauty, Position and Punishment – Dan E.
- Primal Scenes and the Female Gothic: Rebecca and Gaslight – John Fletcher
- Black Satin: Fantasy, Murder and the Couple in Gaslight and Rebecca – Ed Gallafent
Despite its ostentatious milieu, Hitchcock’s Rebecca deftly conveys personal but universal themes and speaks deeply to the way most of us feel at least at some time in our lives. Of course, it wouldn’t be Hitchcock if there wasn’t some sexual tension and ambiguity simmering away just below the surface, and Rebecca has it in spades.
- Rebecca: Mad about the girl – Germaine Greer
- Rebecca as Female Oedipal Drama – Tania Modleski
- Female Love Triangle at the Heart of Rebecca – Rebecca McCallum
- Rebecca: How a Lesbian-Inflected Movie Got Made – Duke Greenhill
- Resolving Female Sexuality in Rebecca and Notorious – Natalie Bigelow
- Hitchcock’s Rebecca: A rhetorical study of female stereotyping – Elizabeth Langenfeld
- Lesbian Sightings in Rebecca and The Uninvited – Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies (2018)
Rebecca: Things you should know/Part II | Rites of Passage
Making Manderley
Tracking Camera in Rebecca | Frame by Frame
Naturally, the fictional Manderley as depicted onscreen has always been a composite of studio sets, models and real locations. According to one source, Hitch said the exteriors of his version were based on “Apsley Hall” (Apley Hall?), while Selznick’s obsession with the faithful “picturization” of his films’ source novels, led him to misguidedly send a designer to sketch the interiors of du Maurier’s beloved Menabilly and more. However, had Selznick only asked, the writer could have told him she actually had Cambridgeshire’s Milton Hall in mind for the grand setting of her novel. In the event, 40 sets were created by 29-time Academy Award nominee and five-time winner, art director Lyle R. Wheeler. All were moodily lit by eight-time nominee and one-time winner, for Rebecca, cinematographer George Barnes.
Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde, 2024
Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde, 2024
In 2007, The Wrong House, an expansive exhibition devoted to Hitch’s onscreen architecture, was staged at the deSingel arts centre in Antwerp. Its curator’s eponymous tie-in book was revised and reprinted in 2014, and joined even more recently by a 2022 volume covering similar ground. Nonetheless, both examine in surprisingly fascinating and unique detail how methodically Hitch applied his early grounding in art direction and set design to every film he helmed, with unerringly effective results.
- The Wrong House: The Architecture of AH (2007/2014) – Steven Jacobs | review, #2
- Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of AH (2022) – Christine Madrid French
Manderley ground floor plan from The Wrong House
Rebecca: Writing on a Classic; Collectors Guide, Part 2: Production, 3: Home video, 4: 1956 re-release and bootlegs, 5: Soundtrack and radio, 6: Remakes
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This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.
