Rebecca (1940): Eitan's Take

I can't tell you how completely pleased I am -- if you could see the wide smirk across my face, you'd know -- that Alfred Hitchcock's utterly perverse, demented, and sickeningly awesome Rebecca won Best Picture. As impressed as I was by the sweep and perfectly executed drama of Gone With the Wind, it was a pretty obvious shoo-in for the award. Rebecca is the anti-GWTW, romantic in all the wrong ways, disquieting and raw, maddening, and suspenseful. It's far from a perfect film, and at some points I was waiting for Hitchcock to go all-out-Hitchcock on the sordid plot, but I realize he was slightly limited by the source material. Du Maurier's story is wonderful and chilling, and definitely worthy of his adaptation (as was her similarly creepy story "The Birds"), but I've always thought that Hitchcock did better with his own story ideas than with the ideas of others.

Either way, this movie confirms why Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most beloved directors of all time. In every scene, we feel his confident hand guide moment after moment of dread and queasiness. Every closeup of Laurence Olivier's tortured face, every shot of clandestinely lesbian Mrs. Danvers sullenly insist on the world's eternal love for the recently dead Rebecca, every moment we watch Joan Fontaine live a terrifying lie for her strange and wayward husband we are reminded of Hitchcock's total mastery of the camera. He mixes in elements of voyeurism (the creepy old man by the docks), murder (Rebecca's mysterious disappearance that goes unexplained until the very end), and the twists and turns we expect from him. While Rebecca doesn't quite measure up to the director's absolute masterpieces (Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Strangers on a Train), it shows the same penchant for smart, dark weirdness and the complete ugliness of humanity; after nearly a decade of middlebrow "important message films," I'm utterly pleased that the Academy took such a left turn and picked something rather unconventional for their award. I have no doubt that this choice set the precedent for many other winners in the same demented vein: Midnight Cowboy, Silence of the Lambs, and American Beauty. I give it an 8/10.