Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) (Patreon)

And it is here that the exactitude of Hitchcock's filmmaking runs up against the intractability of my personal taste. Rebecca is formally magnificent. Its use of the preposterously grand Manderley estate as a kind of architectural corpse, a labyrinth that exerts the power of the previous Mrs. de Winter, is not only poetically precise. It seems to have forever set the cinematic terms for gothic horror. Many a haunted house has been erected since 1940 and they all seem to owe a stylistic debt to Rebecca. Thematically, the sad tale of the Second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) could also be said to provide a template for the psychological trope of the female identity-swap, best exemplified by Bergman in Persona but iterated in films as diverse as 3 Women and Mulholland Dr. The trick here, of course, is that the Other Woman is an absence, a hole in the text that the living woman keeps chasing, and being chased by.

Having said all that, Selznick's demand that Hitchcock adapt du Maurier's novel as faithfully as possible generates a number of problems. I personally find the gothic literary genre stultifying, unless its contours are actively manipulated by an transgressive stylist like Shirley Jackson. Right out of the gate, when we meet the cagey, abrupt Maxim (Laurence Olivier) in Monte Carlo, we can see that Rebecca is an artificial tale about types and placeholders, not a story about recognizable human beings. Actually, this is evident even before Maxim shows up. The Margaret Dumontish officiousness of Mrs. Van Hopper (Florence Bates) already situates Rebecca firmly in the realm of abstraction.

And yet, Rebecca addresses the viewer as if he or she is supposed to care about these bizarre concept-humans. Fontaine's character, almost impossibly daft and perpetually overwhelmed, is a puzzle piece that fits so poorly at Manderley that it beggars belief that Maxim would be fascinated by her at all, much less marry her. We eventually understand why he finds her desirable -- it's almost as though his innocence is its own sort of conspiracy, one that requires a passive dupe -- but there's no getting around the fact that she is there to be dramaturgical roadkill.

Indeed, she is repeatedly run down by the iconically menacing Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), the character that's really the linchpin of du Maurier's entire aesthetic. Danvers' existence is completely predicated on her I've-got-a-secret signposting. She's walking subtext, and while Danvers' demeanor points quite clearly to Rebecca's oblique perversions -- possibly a Sapphic psychopath, but a willing party to incest at the very least -- her taciturn menace points to the restrictions of the Hays Code more than anything else.

Hitchcock orchestrates Rebecca's machinations marvelously well. But there's no getting around the fact that the source material is a sub-Freudian slog. Beautifully mounted though it may be, Rebecca is a bit like a Rembrandt painting of Count Orlok. Why am I looking at this? And why did someone feel compelled to make it?