Rebecca

The sensual gothic daydream of Rebecca has always fit oddly alongside Alfred Hitchcock's other works. The director resented producer David O. Selznick's heavy hand and expressed mixed feelings towards the end result—"Well, it's not a Hitchcock picture," he told Truffaut—but who can resist this intoxicating blend of Jane Eyre and Bluebeard, spiced with a dash of Alice in Wonderland? (Is it just me or do the doorknobs get higher as the film progresses?) Our heroine, played by Joan Fontaine, is a gawky young woman so unformed that she lacks even a name. We know her only as the first-person singular in the film's opening narration, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Without prospects or family, she is an eager bride to Maxim de Winter, a broody old-money type sulking his way across the French Riviera with the ghost of his dead wife. The young woman becomes the second Mrs. de Winter and moves into the extravagant Manderley estate, where the dead wife's initial is branded upon everything in sight. Impostor syndrome seems the only possible outcome in a place where you can't even blow your own nose without being handed your predecessor's monogrammed handkerchief. The unseen Rebecca looms large as an impossible standard of femininity—breeding, brains, and beauty, Maxim glumly notes—that the younger woman can never possibly match.

From this sinister fairy tale of a young woman's coming of age we shift to plodding procedural in the film's later moments. To satisfy the production code, the filmmakers contort the plot in sometimes baffling ways—I never knew one person could die by murder, suicide, and natural causes simultaneously—but ghosts are harder to appease than Will Hays. The second Mrs. de Winter loathes her predecessor but also feels the seductive pull of that personality, with its promise of beauty, glamour, and a secure place in the world. The narrator is all but drowning in the luxury of Manderley—she clings to the walls as if the polished floors could swallow her whole—and Rebecca torments her like a distant shore. Introduced to viewers as a dream, the entire film can be seen as a young woman's overwrought fantasy of married life, poised somewhere between excitement and dread. "We're happy, aren't we? Terribly happy!" she pleads with her husband, and neither looks terribly convinced of the sentiment. Instead, they watch film footage of their honeymoon and tell each other that images of married bliss can stand in for the real thing, while the narrator looks back on this sad moment from an indeterminate present, chasing a fleeting happiness through these layers of fantasy and memory. Manderley is gone, all traces of Rebecca consumed by fire, and still the place holds the narrator in its thrall. Perhaps birds sometimes dream of their gilded cages too.