Part of Romance Is Dead
Romance becomes psychodrama in the elegantly crafted REBECCA, Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into Hollywood filmmaking. A dreamlike adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, the film stars the enchanting Joan Fontaine as a young woman who believes she has found her heart’s desire when she marries the dashing aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter (played with cunning vulnerability by Laurence Olivier). But upon moving to Manderley — her groom’s baroque ancestral mansion — she soon learns that his deceased wife haunts not only the estate but the temperamental, brooding Maxim as well.
The start of Hitchcock’s legendary collaboration with producer David O. Selznick, this elegiac gothic vision, captured in stunning black and white by George Barnes, won Academy Awards for best picture and best cinematography.
“A resounding triumph…. One of three films Hitchcock adapted from novels by Daphne du Maurier…never veers too much into the macabre darkness that Hitchcock is so associated with, but remains cold and unnerving.“ —Jon Patridge, cinapse.co “A film about abusive relationships, and the way power might shift within them…. We can all see ourselves in Fontaine…the most human, heartbreakingly vulnerable person ever to appear in a Hitchcock film.” —Michael Hann, Guardian “Best remembered today for three reasons…the only Alfred Hitchcock film to win a Best Picture Academy Award…Joan Fontaine’s star-making vehicle and…one of the most thinly-veiled lesbian cautionary tales of the Hays Code era of Hollywood filmmaking.“ —Les Fabian Brathwaite, IndieWire
