A Film Canon

 

 

This masterful adaptation of Du Maurier's novel translates Rebecca's presence directly into cinematography, presenting her as the mildest translucence, or slightest shadow, which nevertheless pervades the entirety of Manderlay, the Gothic mansion that the second Mrs. De Winter (Joan Fontaine) and her husband (Lawrence Olivier) make their home; a "quick, light step" that can always almost be heard. To this end, Hitchcock and cinematographer George Barnes structure the dappled house around Rebecca's boudoir, itself presented as a series of increasingly rarefied surfaces, encompassing her massive curtains, bed drapings, night dress ("Did you ever see anything so delicate?"), and, eventually, the fog that pours through her window, the only place in the house with an aspect of the sea, as well as the fire that ultimately consumes it, photographed more delicately than any inferno to date. The result is a profound collapse of subject and object that belies Hitchcock's claim not to have left his full signature upon the film, and is encapsulated in the tension between the second Mrs. De Winter and Manderlay; or, alternatively, between her and housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), whose antagonistic personification of her abode is evinced in the indistinguishability of her face from its various timepieces, and whose moment of truth comes with her recommendation that the second Mrs. De Winter model herself after one of its portraits for a costume party. This enlivening is reinforced by the palpable staginess of the opening act, set in Monte Carlo, as well as Hitchcock's pervasive tendency to pull back from the action to a long shot whose physical counterpart is the massive staircase that directs the second Mrs. De Winter's eyes up at the uncanny mass of space around her. In the end, Rebecca manages to distil memory itself into a luscious, perfumed humidity, confirming that Manderlay has its own weather patterns, and anticipating Vertigo.