Having become the most famous film-maker in Britain, Alfred Hitchcock set out to conquer America, as war clouds gathered over Europe. He was criticised by some of his peers for seeking refuge in Hollywood while his compatriots were resisting the might of Nazi Germany. But Hitch had been planning his relocation since first visiting the United States in 1937. Three years later, he made his American debut, and Cinema Paradiso shows how Rebecca (1940) not only enhanced its director's reputation by taking the Academy Award for Best Picture, but has also continued to provide inspiration over the ensuing eight decades.
There's a simple reason why Rebecca remains essential viewing 80 years after it was made. The shape-shifting story. It starts off as a class comedy, as a timid paid companion (Joan Fontaine) traipses around Monte Carlo in the wake of snooty socialite Mrs Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates). From the moment the waif is spotted by the dashing Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), however, she is swept up into a whirlwind romance that infuriates her overbearing employer and so delights the eligible Maxim that he pops the question and hastens the new Mrs de Winter to her new country manor, Manderley.
No sooner has she stepped out of her husband's car than Mrs de Winter steps into a Gothic fairytale that comes with its own wicked witch, in the form of Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), the aggressively deferential housekeeper who was devoted to the new mistress's predecessor. As Rebecca haunts every room of Manderley, our hapless heroine now finds herself trapped in a ghost story. Her spouse dismisses her fears as penny dreadful nonsense, however, and her attempts to get back into his good books by copying a family portrait for a costume ball only serve to pitch him into a fouler mood.
Following a subtle Sapphic interlude and the intrusion of the raffish Jack Favell (George Sanders), however, Maxim comes to rely on his bride, as the final narrative shift treats us to a murder mystery. Rather than being a peevish chauvinist, Maxim turns out to be an emasculated soul in torment who had hoped that the trusting stranger he had met on the Riviera could help him forget the traumatic events that had taken place on the Cornish coast. True to form with this twisting, turning saga, however, the ending can hardly be described as a happy one. Indeed, there's a touch of Grand Guignol about the closing conflagration, as Rebecca exacts her revenge from beyond the grave and sends the newlyweds into what would appear to be a highly uncertain future.
Hollywood was so impressed by this assured blend of macabre melodrama and psychological sophistication that, at the height of the studio era, it bestowed 11 Oscar nominations on what was essentially an independent production. As was his wont, producer David O. Selznick tried to take the credit. But this would have been a very different picture without Alfred Hitchcock, who had managed after a false start to convince novelist Daphne Du Maurier that he knew what he was doing when it came to adapting one of her books.
Captain Hook's Daughter
Alfred Hitchcock had first met Daphne Du Maurier while producing Benn Levy's Lord Camber's Ladies (1932), a neglected adaptation of a Horace Annesley Vachell play that had starred the celebrated stage actor Gerald Du Maurier, who had taken the dual role of Mr Darling and Captain Hook in the original 1904 production of JM Barrie's Peter Pan. This was rather apt, as Du Maurier was the uncle of the Llewellyn Davies boys who had inspired the story and Daphne's mother, Emma, is played by Julie Christie in Marc Forster's Finding Neverland (2004), which stars Johnny Depp as Barrie.
Tim Potter can also be seen playing Hook and it would be another piratical scenario that would being Hitchcock back into the Du Maurier fold. While filming Daphne's fourth novel, Jamaica Inn (1938), he got to read the galleys of her follow-up project, Rebecca, and tried to use his family connection to get the rights at a knockdown price. However, Du Maurier had been so disappointed with Hitch's take on her Cornish smuggling saga that she had wept 'bitter tears' on seeing it. The director would also later disown a picture that had largely been hijacked by its star and co-producer, Charles Laughton. At the time, however, Hitchcock was concerned that its lukewarm reception might scupper his plans to relocate to Hollywood.
Throughout the 1930s, Hitch had steadily been building a reputation as the 'Master of Suspense', with thrillers like The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) making him the most famous director in Britain. For all their domestic success, however, the films had been consigned to the arthouse circuit in the United States and, while RKO, MGM and the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn had all made overtures, no one had made an offer to tempt Hitchcock away from Gaumont-British, where he enjoyed unprecedented creative freedom under production chief Michael Balcon.
With the UK industry in the doldrums and war looming, the 39 year-old Hitchcock decided to trade this autonomy for security in California when he signed a contract with the most controlling producer in Tinseltown. David O. Selznick was preoccupied with completing his adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's bestseller, Gone With the Wind (1939), and had little time for Hitchcock and his screenwriter wife Alma Reville when they first arrived. But, undaunted by the fact that Selznick had the habit of firing directors with minds of their own, Hitch started work on a script about the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912.
It soon became clear, however, that Selznick didn't have the budget to do the story justice and he suggested that Hitchcock turn his attention to an adaptation of Rebecca, which he had acquired for $50,000. As he was somewhat in thrall to his wife, Irene - who was the daughter of MGM boss, Louis B. Mayer - Selznick evidently empathised with Maxim De Winter's plight of being in the shadow of a glamorous spouse and there's something telling in the fact that he asked Irene to provide the handwriting in Rebecca's address book. Of course, Du Maurier had also let a little autobiographical detail seep into her text, as soldier husband Frederick Browning had been engaged to the glamorous Jan Ricardo before they met and Du Maurier had felt anxious that he had settled for a consolation prize. Known to his wartime comrades as 'Boy', Browning was played by Dirk Bogarde in Richard Attenborough's reconstruction of Operation Market Garden, A Bridge Too Far (1977).
Recognising that Du Maurier's multi-layered country house drama was more in his line, Hitchcock agreed to the switch. But he soon discovered the pitfalls of working with such a hands-on producer. Unable to persuade Du Maurier to write the screenplay, Hitchcock set about producing a treatment of the novel with his trusted assistant, Joan Harrison, and writer Michael Hogan. In declining Hitch's invitation, Du Maurier had urged him not to show Rebecca and he followed her instruction to the letter. However, Selznick was less than amused by some comic business involving cigar smoke and seasickness during the Monte Carlo sequences and fizzed off one of his famous memos to inform the hireling that he was 'shocked and disappointed beyond words' by such departures from the text as the addition of a mad grandmother in the attic at Manderley.
Hitchcock had sought to defend his gambit by claiming that it drew attention to the story's similarity to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. But Selznick stood firm, branding the script, 'a distorted and vulgarised version of a provenly successful work' while lamenting that 'old-fashioned movie scenes have been substituted for the captivatingly charming Du Maurier scenes'. Moreover, he curtly reminded the director, 'We bought Rebecca and we intend to make Rebecca.'
Selznick also refused to let Hitchcock bring in British stalwart Sidney Gilliat or playwright Lillian Hellman, who had offered to redraft the Riviera sequences. Three decades later, this phase of Hellman's life would be revisited by Fred Zinnemann in Julia (1977), with Jane Fonda playing Hellman opposite the Oscar-winning Vanessa Redgrave as her best friend. Instead, Selznick offered Hitchcock the services of such established writers as Ben Hecht, Clemence Dane, John Baldeston, Sidney Howard and Hugh Walpole. However, he insisted on preparing his own 100-page outline with Alma Reville and the Scottish novelist, Philip MacDonald.
Once again, Selznick was perplexed and informed Hitchcock that he had hired double Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert E. Sherwood, to polish the dialogue and find a solution to the problem posed by Du Maurier's ending, as Production Code chief Joseph Breen couldn't allow Maxim to get away with murder. He was equally adamant that all intimations that Mrs Danvers had been sexually attracted to Rebecca should also be removed from the script. But, while seeming to oblige, Hitchcock cannily bypassed the censor by having Judith Anderson place her hand inside a transparent negligée in such a reverential manner that she seemed to be more devoted than besotted. Such deft touches pleased Selznick, who had considered sticking to the original denouement and releasing the picture without the PCA seal of approval that was almost de rigueur in Golden Age Hollywood. But he signed off the shooting script and threw himself into promoting Gone With the Wind so that it would break box-office records and set new standards at the Academy Awards.
Putting Faces to the Names
When story editor Kay Brown first suggested Rebecca as a potential property, Selznick had considered teaming Carole Lombard and Ronald Colman, whose two-picture deal had started with John Cromwell's The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). However, Colman didn't think playing a killer would be good for his image, while he also felt the dramatic focus fell on the Second Mrs de Winter and he didn't fancy playing second fiddle to an ingénue, As a result, he never got round to honouring the terms of his contract.
As Selznick was busy with GWTW, he allowed Orson Welles to adapt Rebecca for his Mercury Theatre of the Air troupe and Margaret Sullavan had so impressed the mogul in the radio broadcast aired on 9 December 1938 that he had seriously considered her for the character Hitchcock had dubbed 'Daphne' in his draft script. Having generated plenty of publicity with his search for Scarlett O'Hara, however, Selznick decided to let the press spend a few months speculating about who was going to be his new leading lady.
Naturally, Vivien Leigh's name was mentioned and, as she was having an affair with Laurence Olivier, he emerged as a contender to play Maxim. Hitchcock favoured a reunion with Robert Donat, who had excelled as Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps. But his star had still to rise Stateside, as he had yet to pip Clark Gable to the Oscar for Best Actor for his charming performance in Sam Wood's Goodbye Mr Chips (1939). Consequently, Selznick was contemplating Leslie Howard, Walter Pidgeon, Melvyn Douglas and William Powell when he caught Olivier playing Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939) and saw the brooding menace he felt Maxim possessed.
David Niven was mentioned for Jack Flavell before Selznick dismissed him as 'hollow' and he similarly discarded John Mills and Guy Middleton before assigning the role to George Sanders, who did a nice line in cads, despite having played both The Saint and The Falcon with debonair insouciance in B series that are both available from Cinema Paradiso. Australian Judith Anderson was also a shoo-in for Mrs Danvers, despite consideration being given to Flora Robson and Alla Nazimova, the bisexual Russian actress who had made her screen debut in Herbert Brenon's War Brides (1918), which had been produced by Selznick's father, Lewis.
In something of a coup, Selznick sprang a surprise with the insufferably snobby Mrs Van Hopper by overlooking such experienced character players as Laura Hope Crews, Lucille Watson, Mary Boland, Alice Brady and Cora Witherspoon by casting Texas lawyer Florence Bates in her first credited role. He played safer, however, in recruiting several respected British thespians for the other key supports, with Reginald Denny (Frank Crawley), C. Aubrey Smith (Colonel Julyan), Melville Cooper (the coroner) and Leo G. Carroll (Dr Baker) being joined by Gladys Cooper and the scene-stealing Nigel Bruce, as Maxim's sister, Beatrice, and her dufferishly flirtatious husband, Major Giles Lacy.
While Hitchcock toiled on the script, George Cukor and John Cromwell conducted a series of screen tests with Brits Vivien Leigh, Heather Angel and Nova Pilbeam, as well as such rising talents as Loretta Young, Anne Shirley, Ellen Drew, Anita Louise, Frances Dee, Andrea Leeds and Evelyn Keyes, who had just played Suellen O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Hitchcock also proposed Irish actress Maureen O'Hara, who has made an impression in Jamaica Inn, while they even considered silent superstar Douglas Fairbanks's niece, Lucille. The final choice, however, came down to Margaret Sullavan, 16 year-old Anne Baxter and Joan Fontaine, who had given a decent account of herself in trying to stay in step with Fred Astaire in A Damsel in Distress (1937) and Cary Grant in Gunga Din (1939), which had both been directed by George Stevens.
The mere mention of the latter prompted her sister and bitter rival Olivia de Havilland to withdraw from the running, although she would later get to headline a Du Maurier adaptation, Henry Koster's My Cousin Rachel (1952), another simmering melodrama that would be remade by Roger Michell in 2017, with Rachel Weisz in the lead. Among the other Du Maurier adaptations available from Cinema Paradiso are Compton Bennett's The Years Between (1946), Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Charles Sturridge's The Scapegoat (2012) and Philippa Lowthorpe's Jamaica Inn (2014).
Rumours persist that Selznick opted for Fontaine because they had been lovers, but he had actually been struck by the fact that she had mentioned she had just finished reading Rebecca when they first met at a dinner party. Yet Fontaine was so convinced that she wouldn't get the part that she had gone on honeymoon to Oregon with British actor Brian Aherne, and had to be summoned back to Hollywood. In fact, Fontaine proved to be an inspired piece of casting, as her marriage gave her a unique insight into Mrs De Winter's predicament because not only was Aherne still obsessed with old flame Clare Eames, but his butler took an instant dislike to Fontaine and so looked down his nose that it took her a while to feel comfortable in her new home. Hitchcock would exploit this anxiety in coaxing a performance out of an actress who had acquired the snide nickname of 'the wooden woman'.
The Road to Manderley
Relations between Selznick and Hitchcock became strained during the writing and casting phases, with the producer being so surprised by the director's seemingly lackadaisical preparations for the shoot that he joked 'Hitchcock is not a man to go camping with.' In fact, Hitch was known for his meticulous planning and had found time during the 21-week writing stage to produce storyboards for each sequence to ensure that the finished picture resembled his conception by limiting the number of shot options available to editor Hal C. Kern and, therefore, Selznick, who was notorious for tinkering in post-production. Moreover, Hitch had consulted with production designer Lyle R. Wheeler to ensure that the sets and furnishings appeared outsized to emphasise how small the new incumbent was in her grandiose surroundings.
Five days before shooting started on 8 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. Consequently, the British cast members were feeling understandably despondent, as they tried to contact family members back home. The situation clearly distressed the 76 year-old C. Aubrey Smith, who arrived on the set having learned the wrong part. George Sanders's mood was scarcely improved by a foundering love affair, while Judith Anderson arrived from Reno, Nevada having just secured a divorce from academic Benjamin Lehmann.
Working outside Britain for the first time since his early excursions to Germany, Hitchcock found adapting to Hollywood working methods something of a trial. In particular, he disliked having to rehearse while the technicians were lighting the next set-up. He also resented the fact that Selznick had instructed assistant director Eric Stacey and script girl Lydia Schiller to provide daily reports on his progress and was nettled by the memos reminding him that he had 36 days to complete the shoot and that additions to the $850,000 budget would be frowned upon. There was little he could do, however, when the second unit crew shooting the approach to Manderley wound up in hospital after coming into contact with poison ivy near Del Monte.
Ignoring complaints about the shortage of coverage, Hitch stuck to his storyboards, although he did respond to suggestions that Olivier was rushing his lines and Fontaine was over-simpering. But he found an unlikely ally in Irene Selznick, who was so taken with the daily rushes that she persuaded her husband against closing the picture down because Hitchcock refused to conform to his diktats. She might have been less supportive had she known how Hitchcock was treating his leading lady. He allowed Olivier to vent his spleen that she had been chosen over Vivien Leigh by being curt on set and mocking her choice of husband. Hitchcock also kept Fontaine apart from her fellow cast members, so she felt uneasy around them. Moreover, he pointed out how poorly she was being paid compared to her co-stars and even forgot to invite anyone to a surprise birthday party he threw on 22 October. To cap it all, when Anderson baulked at Fontaine's request to slap her face so that she could cry during their key bedroom scene, her director duly obliged.
Feeling victimised and under-appreciated, Fontaine fell ill with influenza and had to be hospitalised. Further delays were caused by a three-day strike by the powerful IATSE stagehands' union, which resulted in the shoot sprawling out to 63 days. Almost as soon as the production wrapped on 20 November, Hitchcock had to begin Walter Wanger's Foreign Correspondent (1940). As a result, he was powerless to prevent Selznick from reacting to a rough cut preview in San Bernardino on 26 December by ordering several scenes to be rewritten and re-shot. Moreover, much of Fontaine, Sanders and Bates's dialogue had to be re-recorded, while Selznick changed the tone of a number of scenes by laying in Franz Waxman's occasionally melodramatic score. He still managed to upset the composer, however, by replacing his music for the breakfast scene with a snippet from Max Steiner's score for William Wellman's A Star Is Born (1937), which Selznick had produced.
Hitchcock would later swear that the producer had wanted the smoke billowing from Manderley to form an 'R' in the night sky. But this was a bit of mischievous misinformation after Selznick had rubbished Hitch's climactic shot of the monogram on Rebecca's nightdress case. The upshot of the various delays and retakes was that the budget spiralled to $1,288,000 and Selznick knew he needed a sizeable hit to break even.
'Stood Up Quite Well Over the Years'
It's noticeable that Hitchcock is barely recognisable in his unusually delayed cameo in Rebecca. He almost has his back to the camera and wears a hat to cover his bald head, as he scurries past George Sanders as he emerges from a phone box and talks to a policeman. Perhaps Hitch decided to be more self-effacing than usual on his Hollywood debut or maybe he had already reached the conclusion that he shared with François Truffaut during their famous 1962 interview that this was 'not a Hitchcock picture'. He continued, 'it's a novelette, really. The story is old-fashioned; there was a whole school of feminine literature at the period, and though I'm not against it, the fact is that the story is lacking in humour.'
When pressed during the course of an encounter that is commemorated in Kent Jones's Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), Hitch admitted his surprise that the film 'has stood up quite well over the years'. But he clearly has little affection for the feature or its producer, who penchant for sending long-winded memos Hitchcock lampooned when he announced that he was planning to base a film on one message that he intended calling The Longest Story Ever Told. They would collaborate again on Spellbound (1945) and The Paradine Case (1947), but Hitchcock exacted his cruel revenge on Selznick when he had Raymond Burr's killer in Rear Window (1954) made up to resemble him.
This bitterness might have something to do with the fact that Hitchcock was overlooked for Best Director at the 13th Academy Awards, while Selznick got to take home the Oscar for Best Picture. In fairness, the producer had done much in post-production to tighten the action and he certainly relished his moment in winning Hollywood's most prestigious prize in consecutive years. The only other victor from 11 nominations was George Barnes for his evocative monochrome photography. Consequently, Rebecca remains the only Best Picture winner since the Best Supporting categories were introduced in 1936 to take the top prize and miss out entirely for its writing, acting and direction. For the record, Hitchcock was beaten by John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath, while Anderson lost out to Jane Darwell in the same film. Olivier was pipped by James Stewart in Frank Capra's Mr Smith Goes to Washington, while Fontaine had to applaud as Ginger Rogers was called to the stage for Sam Wood's Kitty Foyle.
To add insult to injury, Hitchcock had the unusual distinction of beating himself to Best Picture, as Foreign Correspondent joined Grapes of Wrath, George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator in losing graciously. Over the next two decades, Hitch would be spurned again for Lifeboat (1943), Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho (1960). Indeed, the only thing he ever received from the Academy was the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968.
He did have the pleasure of directing Fontaine to an Oscar the following year, however, when she won for her performance as Lina McLaidlaw opposite Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941). This must have caused a commotion within the family circle, as Fontaine had become estranged from both mother Lillian and sister, Olivia De Havilland. Indeed, when she had been forced to miss the Radio City premiere of Rebecca because she was having surgery on an ovarian cyst, Fontaine had been forced to hear her mother tell gossip columnist Louella Parsons during a radio transmission: 'Joan may be phony in real life, but she's almost believable on screen,' She would go on to play a second Du Maurier heroine, Dona St Columb, in Mitchell Leisen's rousing Technicolor take on Frenchman's Creek (1944).
Having banked $2.5 million from Rebecca's first-year gross, Selznick also had an eventful 1941, as he fell in love with Jennifer Jones after signing her to a seven-year contract. After winning the Oscar for Best Actress in Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943), she collaborated with her new mentor on John Cromwell's Since You Went Away (1944), King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1945) and William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie (1948), which contained several echoes of Rebecca. Marrying Selznick in 1949, Jones went on to team with Olivier on William Wyler's underrated adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's Carrie (1952), in which George Hurstwood's respectable Chicago existence unravels when he falls in love with a younger woman from beneath his station.
Hitchcock wouldn't return to Du Maurier until he made The Birds (1963). But, as film historian David Thomson has noted, she continued to exert a considerable influence on his intervening career, as unreliable heroes populated such films as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Under Capricorn (1949), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Wrong Man (1956) and North By Northwest (1959). Moreover, he would also return to the theme of a man seeking to remodel the woman in his life in both Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964).
Du Maurier would have less success when she tried to bring Rebecca to the stage, as the play ran for just 20 performances on Broadway in 1945. Radio broadcasts with Ronald Colman and Ida Lupino (1941), Loretta Young and John Lund (1948) and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (1950) proved more successful, while television audiences were treated to the pairings of Michael Hordern and Dorothy Gordon (1947), James Mason and Joan Hackett (1962) and Jeremy Brett and Joanna David (1978) before Charles Dance and Emilia Fox were teamed in Jim O'Brien's Granada adaptation of Rebecca (1997), which earned Diana Rigg an Emmy for her performance as Mrs Danvers.
Cinema Paradiso users can also check out Ananth Narayan Mahadevan's Bollywood reworking, Anamika: The Untold Story (2008), which stars Minissha Lamba and Dino Morea. They can also sample a range of features that were influenced by Hitchcock's drama that includes Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Dragonwyck (1946), Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door (1947), Alex Nicol's The Screaming Skull (1958), François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Roy Ward Baker's And Now the Screaming Starts (1973), Alejandro Armenabar's The Others (2001) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017). Also available are such knowing lampoons as Robert Moore's Neil Simon-scripted Murder By Death (1976), Mel Brooks's High Anxiety (1977) and Carl Reiner's The Man With Two Brains (1983).
To date, no one has adapted either Susan Hill's sequel, Mrs de Winter (1993), or Sally Brauman's follow-on, Rebecca's Tale. But the legacy of Du Maurier, Selznick and Hitchcock's collaboration lingers on and, later this year, there will be a chance to see Ben Wheatley's take on Rebecca, which was filmed at Cranborne Manor in Dorset, with Armie Hammer as Maxim, Lily James as his new bride and Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers.
