This blog thing is hard! I want to make the entries as interesting as possible, but I also want to catch up as less than a month in, we’re already nearly a month behind!
We had “Rebecca” delivered via our Bigpond account (essential for all movie lovers without limitless budgets!) and as soon as it arrived I wanted to watch it. I had studied the book in highschool and always loved the story, so I wanted to see how it was adapted to film. We were both really curious to see Hitchcock’s only Oscar winner and we both enjoy watching Hitchcock torture his female leads (on and offscreen) and this certainly didn’t disappoint.
Joan Fontaine is absolutely stunning and suitably awkward as the young and naïve new Mrs De Winter next to the frosty and inscrutable Laurence Olivier. Apparently poor Joan was detested by her onscreen love interest, Laurence, who had wanted his then real-life girlfriend, Vivien Leigh in the role. In true Hitchcock style this was used to enhance her discomfort on set; he told her that the entire cast hated her and she spent most of her time between takes hiding in her trailer and I think that really comes across in the film! She just doesn’t fit in (as of course she isn’t supposed to).
Our biggest problem with this film is our chief complaint with many of Hitchcock’s films; he was such a control freak he would film most scenes against a screen rather than risk having outdoor conditions interfere with his ‘process’. This really distracted us in some scenes; they were having an emotional discussion about the drowning of the first Mrs DeWinter on top of a cliff and it’s supposed to be a very tense, emotional scene, but you’re just watching the bad screen effects.
Mrs Danvers was suitably creepy and cold and you really feel the new Mrs DeWinter's discomfort and awkwardness. One of my favourite scenes involves her breaking a small ornament and hiding it in the back of a drawer because she’s too intimidated by the house staff to tell them she’s broken it.
It’s a great story, full of the twists from Daphne Du Maurier’s original book, masterfully adapted by the master of the twist (and the original blue screen) Hitchcock. The acting was a little overwrought, which was interesting considering how natural the acting was in “It Happened One Night” which was made 6 years earlier.
Apparently the film was so big in Spain that even now, the two-piece cardigans that Joan Fontaine wears in the movie are still called ‘rebeccas’; so that has to bump the score up on Social Context/Relevance scale! (which we use to take into account pop culture value).
Our final scores were: Mat – 77%, Danielle – 73%.
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