Gothic Romance: Rebecca (Dir Alfred Hitchcock, 2h10m, 1940)

February, as long time readers are well aware, given over to romance; this February, we turn to its teetering atmospheric cousin, Gothic romance, a realm of darkness, obsession, and, as feminist film theorist, Diane Waldman identified it in 1984 in Cinema Journal, "the articulation of feminine fear, anger, and distrust of the patriarchal order", where younger women are drawn and repelled in equal measures towards a handsome older man, often with a past of his own. Over the next three weeks we will consider Gothic romance, from adaptions of perhaps its most famous novel to a vampiric couple trying to make sense of the modern world, to the master of modern horror turning his hand to a fresh take on the Gothic romance. We begin with the work that most encapsulates Waldman's definition of the Gothic romance, with Alfred Hitchcock's adaption of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

The year is 1939: Alfred Hitchcock has already become a household name in Great Britain with over twenty films directed by him, including Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps. He has also realised his career in the UK has peaked and has voyaged across to the United States to meet film mogul and producer, David O. Selznick, himself at this point already producing Gone with the Wind. The four-film contract will later produce Spellbound and The Paradine Case, but its true gem is Rebecca. Based on the du Maurier novel, in which a nameless young woman (played by Joan Fontaine, who would win an Oscar for her role in Hitchcock's next feature, Suspicion) falls in love with Maxim De Winter (Lawrence Olivier, already having played that other great Gothic hero, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and already in Hollywood because of it). 

However, all is not idyllic at the sprawling Gothic Mandalay, as, settling into life as the second Mrs De Winter, so our heroine must content with the first, the titular Rebecca, never seen but whose presence pervades the film as much as the novel through the set design by Lyle R. Wheeler and the sweeping cinematography by George Barnes, and the unsettling figure of Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) whose disapproval of the second Mrs De Winter, and her unswerving loyalty to Rebecca, including keeping the entire West wing of Mandalay untouched since the death of Rebecca. Slowly undermining the new Mrs De Winter, through constant comparison and her belittling behaviour, and the growing mystery of what happened to Rebecca, so Hitchcock skilfully sets the stage for a battle of wits between our unnamed heroine, and the forces that seek to destroy her and her husband

The Gothic pervades this film: the opening shots, over which Fontaine narrates "I dreamed of Mandalay last night", are a slow drift up to the now ruined manor, its jutting ruin, gutted by the fire that is to come, this fate that hangs over the entire film, the Gothic in miniature, brought to life by an impressively scaled model that reoccurs several times in the film. The mood is set, and the rest of the film will follow it. Returning to England after meeting in the South of France, so Maxim De Winter and our heroine enter into a world of shadows; Rebecca is, quite literally, a shade cast over the house, du Maurier's inner monologue expertly cast onto Fontaine's innocent and often retreating young woman, against which the tall dark and handsome figure of Olivier's Maxim is set, emotionally aloof and hiding his own secrets that spill out over the final third of the film.

Against them is the figure of Mrs Danvers, and the unseen spectral Rebecca herself. The undertones of their relationship, toned down, largely by necessity as the Hayes Code still stood, but still apparent to modern day audiences, may be complex, with hints of something forbidden behind the doors of the West Wing between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca, and the ever-present and decidedly Gothic sense of how much the first Mrs De Winters remains a figure of love, or indeed, lust, but it is only part of the character. Aged down as she is in Hitchcock's film, via scriptwriters Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, Mrs Danvers becomes an emotional rival, not a disapproving mother figure, at once dismissive and belittling. 

As for Rebecca herself, her presence pervades the film in its entirety, the dark shadows, the house's indelible link to the woman who once lived in it leading to shots where Fontaine is almost lost in its scale, or eclipsed by shadows; Rebecca herself overtakes Fontaine's unnamed heroine narratively, her fate, and her complex relationship with her husband, becoming the focus of the film's final act. In unravelling her, so Rebecca, and the men surrounding her, take the film into far more serious and more grounded - and thus, arguably more typically Hitchcockian - territory than anything that takes place in the Mandalay that she still seems to emotionally haunt. 

Through Hitchcock, though, the film becomes a template of the 20th century idea of the Gothic, a young woman figuratively pulling back the shrouds of the woman that her husband once loved, to reveal some dark and unseemly in the depths of the house that has all but become a shrine to her. Hitchcock would later disavow the film, regarding its focus on the feminine, an element pushed by Selznick, and the upper class, something at odds with Hitchcock's focus on the drama of the working class, and in making a modern thriller rather than a(n already retrospective) adaption of a 1930s Gothic-tinged novel. Yet, Rebecca like its namesake, haunts Gothic, and Gothic romance cinema, Hitchcock taking audiences on a thrilling, and unsettling, journey through its halls in search of the fate of its unseen heroine, and the house that acts as her legacy.

Rating: Must See

Rebecca is available to buy on BluRay from Criterion and is available to stream (free) in the UK from JustWatchTV

Next week, to Yorkshire, as we consider Cary Joji Fukunaga's Gothic tinged adaption of Jane Eyre.