Rebecca (1940)

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...'

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…’

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…’ This weekend on Luke Honey’s WEEKEND FLICKS. Cinema for Grown Ups: a Hitchcock Double Bill. Please click here to read Friday’s post on Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental thriller- his first film shot in Technicolor, based on the play by Patrick Hamilton. And in this morning’s newsletter, we take a closer look at Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), based on the Daphne du Maurier classic of 1938, produced by David O. Selznick of Gone to the Wind fame and starring Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the Girl (who remains unnamed).

‘A set designer’s Gothic dream…’

Hollywood’s evocation of Manderley is a set designer’s Gothic dream: a turreted Jacobethan confection, crenellations, castellations and mullioned windows. Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley (as imagined in her bestselling novel) is less defined, and despite the ‘mullioned windows’, possibly Georgian in style- like Menabilly, du Maurier’s country house in Cornwall, or Milton Hall, near Peterborough, seat of the Fitzwilliam family, a house she visited as an impressionable child during the First World War. Daphne du Maurier, is, I think, a visual writer- like so many of the best. She creates an image or an impression- with a few words. The ghastly Mrs Van Hopper. Remember her? The squashed cigarette butts and the cold cream?

‘The Woman in Black: film noir shadows, concealed passages and hidden secrets…’

We all have our own Manderley. Or, at least, I do. Interestingly, this idea of the Gothic ‘mansion’ (as Hollywood might call it)- and I’m using ‘Gothic’ in a broader context- as the definitive setting for intrigue, murder and ghostly happenings, had, by the 1970s (on both film and television), solidified- entrenched in the public imagination on both sides of the Atlantic. In The Haunting (1963), in Scooby-Doo, Where are You? (1969-76), in The Legend of Hell House (1973), Murder by Death (1976) and The Others (2001)- and many, many more: the Cluedobethan pile, an Anglo-American concoction: American Second Empire meets Mock Tudor Manor House: suits of armour, panelling, dusty chandeliers, turrets and verandahs, family portraits, concealed passages and hidden secrets. Although, of course, you might also point a long, gnarled finger, back in time, to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the frivolous Gothick architecture of Strawberry Hill, his retreat to the west of London. And, in a sense, Manderley is a haunted house, perhaps the most ‘haunted’ of them all: seen through the eyes of Joan Fontaine’s heroine, her naive, picture-postcard fantasy a personal nightmare: a ha’penny visitor’s ticket exchanged for film-noir shadows, dark corridors and staircases leading to huge Gothic windows, with the Victorian crinolined presence of Mrs. Danvers- like the Woman in Black, or the Cheltenham Ghost- silent, menacing and shrouded by fog.

‘Laurence Olivier’s Maxim de Winter: aristocratic, aloof, reserved and curt: the dark, brooding romantic hero…’

Which takes us Maxim de Winter. Laurence Olivier’s perfect. The brooding, dark, haunted, romantic hero. Times change and Maxim’s aristocratic, aloof, reserved- and curt- persona, a stiff-upper-lip character type once admired in a literary way, to modern audiences now seems vaguely misogynistic, possibly cruel and probably unpleasant; Mr. Rochester, perhaps, with the looks (and cut) of du Maurier’s husband, the dashing Grenadier Guards officer, ‘Boy’ Browning (later Major General Sir Frederick Arthur Montague Browning, GCVO, KBE, CB, DSO), plus a hint of Daphne du Maurier’s father, the suave matinée idol Sir Gerald du Maurier, with whom- how we can put this tactfully?- Daphne had a troubled relationship.

‘Mrs. Danvers: a silent, menacing crinolined presence shrouded by fog...’

At this point, we need to mention the cinematic adaptation from 2020, starring Lily James as the Girl, Armie Hammer as Maxim and Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers. Modern productions grapple with the complexities of period drama, which most probably had its heyday in the 70s and 80s. They can’t resist an ‘update’; they have to make it ‘current’ (as Mr. Cowell might say); they can’t resist a ‘twist’. And younger actors- through no fault of their own- struggle to portray brittle Society types in any convincing way (cf Lily James in The Pursuit of Love (2021): too ‘street’- products of our democratic age where, despite the best efforts of RADA, Old Harrovians affect the patois of the slums. At the same time, Kristin Scott Thomas- fine actress that she is- is far too glamorous as Mrs. Danvers.

‘an attractive vulnerability…’

Compare this to Jeremy Brett’s performance (as Maxim) in the superior BBC production of 1979, dramatised by Hugh Whitemore, a practice run for Granada’s Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994), with Cornwall’s Caerhayes Castle (1807-1810)- an atmospheric exercise in Regency Gothic- standing in for Manderley, Joanna David as the definitive heroine (twin-set, pearls and tweeds) and Anna Massey as Mrs. Danvers. Now THERE’S Mrs. Danvers! Plus a brilliant use of music, with Debussy’s haunting Footsteps in the Snow played to great effect. Whoever came up with that idea deserves an accolade. So creative.

Joan Fontaine’s terrific too. As the second Mrs. de Winter in the Hitchcock version. Joan’s great. I can’t stress that enough. Perfect. The lonely, timid, insecure middle-class girl, out of her depth in boorish County Society, where downstairs’ snobbery counters the kindness of the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ in-laws. There’s an attractive vulnerability- you understand why Maxim likes her. Rebecca’s casting is one of the many triumphs of the film, now, of course, relegated to classic status- winning Hitchcock an Academy Award for best picture- and deservedly so. And George Sanders puts in a memorable performance as Jack Favell: an up-market second-hand car salesman (A Nightingale did Sing in Berkeley Square), a pin-striped cad in a minor public school tie, a foil to Olivier’s understated Maxim. A lost character of the 20s and 30s, a damaged relic of The Great War, the ex-army Captain turned commercial traveller, Patrick Hamilton’s Ralph Gorse.

‘It’s gone forever…’

‘A desolate shell, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls…’

Although Hollywood watered down the darker aspects of du Maurier’s plot, the production design (by Lyle R. Wheeler, Joseph B. Platt and Howard Bristol) steals the show, reintroducing a sense of the Gothic. It’s Manderley you remember. And as with Jane Eyre’s Thornfield, the house is destroyed in a terrible fire- leaving a blackened, twisted ruin- mirroring the much-publicised remains of Borley Rectory, ‘The Most Haunted House in England’, a tabloid sensation of the 1930s, reduced to a desolate shell the year before Hitchcock’s Rebecca hit the silver screen.

Rebecca (1940), as you might expect, is available to watch via various DVD and Blu-Ray editions, although, surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be available on instant download. There are, however, several decent recordings on YouTube. You can also watch the superior BBC production from 1979 (with Jeremy Brett and Joanna David) on YouTube, although it’s divided up into episodes and the video quality’s pretty dodgy. But worth perservering.

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