Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Soooo, it's finally here, my most anticipated movie of the summer. I've been pining away for this film since I found out there was one, and not only is it Olivier, it's Hitchcock!


I read the Daphne Du Maurier book when I was a girl, maybe 11 or 12 years old. It was simply the greatest book I had ever read, so bleakly romantic, gothic, tragic, tortured. When I read Jane Eyre a few years later i wasn't as impressed as everyone else because it seemed to me to be a paler echo of Rebecca (although obviously now I see that I had that a bit backwards.)

The book was hugely popular, but critically un-loved- "Few saw in the novel what the author wanted them to see: the exploration of the relationship between a man who was powerful and a woman who was not." (Margaret Foster, Daphne du Maurier)

I didn't see it either.  I wasn't resentful of Maxim and his overbearing masculinity- rather I was in love with him. And I certainly didn't guess at any lesbian overtones as Hitch does- Mrs. Danvers was instead every creepy babysitter or mean teacher I had had, a personal archetype which would evolve into Nurse Ratchet later in life.

And most strange of all, I never noticed that Mrs. Maximillian De Winter has no name of her own, and is an anonymous narrator of her own story. That was the most brilliant gambit by Du Maurier. Nothing could be more commonplace than for a woman to be known only by her husband's name, and yet it is the perfect metaphor for the loss of power a woman experiences in the classic "obey thy husband" model of marriage.

But so much for the book. Rebecca the film has become well known as Hitchcock's first collaboration with David O. Selznick, and it has been proposed by some that it is in fact as much a film by one as by the other. There is a famous example of these sometimes clashing visions- Selznick wanted the smoke at the end of the film to form the letter R, which Hitchcock thought was pretty cheesy, and rightfully so. He replaced the shot with a less melodramatic one of a monogrammed R on a suitcase burning in the fire.

If you want to see some of the back and forth between the two titans first hand, I recommend you go to the Making Movies exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center quick before it closes!!


Rebecca, 7pm Saturday, on a gothic double bill with Wuthering Heights