REBECCA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 51, 14 June 1940, Page 30

REBECCA

(United Artists) Here is the kind of picture which stabilises one’s often wavering faith in Hollywood, It would be gratifying to assign all the praise to the British director Alfred Hitchcock, but that would be unfair to the American producer, David Selznick, whose choice of Joan Fontaine as the heroine is responsible in large measure for the film’s success. It would also be unfair to a lot of other people. Just how Selznick came to pick Joan Fontaine, an almost unknown and untried actress, for one of the most exacting roles of recent screen history is something probably only Selznick could explain. Those who saw her lumbering gamely through a part that should have been Ginger Rogers’s in "A Damsel in Distress" could never have imagined that Miss Fontaine had the least qualification for the role of the second Mrs. de Winter in Daphne du Maurier’s bestseller, "Rebecca." A small, part in "The Women" suggested that Joan Fontaine might have more in her than met .the eye; but to most film. fans, up till now, she has been merely Olivia de Havilland’s young sister. Now, if she recovers from a grave operation which she recently underwent, she may well become one of the screen’s leading exponents

of drama. : As the unnamed heroine of "Rebecca," the young, inexperienced, almost gawkish girl who comes to the magnificent, rambling old Cornish mansion of Manderley as the second wife of Manderley’s Byronic, haunted lord and master, Maxim de Winter, Joan Fontaine reveals a perception of character, plus an ability to interpret it, which would merit being termed sensational if Hollywood hadn’t stripped the term of meaning by abusing it. Let’s call it "surprising" and leave it at that. Laurence Olivier is almost as well chosen for the role of the moody Maxim de Winter, who brings home a timid, eager bride from the Riviera and casts her into an atmosphere of strange terror. Over them both broods the impalpable menace of the dead Rebecca, the first Mrs. de Winter, dominating the household in a spiritual sense just as the impassive housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) dominates it in a physical sense. It is Alfred Hitchcock’s contribution to the film that he has taken a wordy novel and translated it to the cinema | without destroying the atmosphere or even losing much of the detail, and yet without cluttering up the action by dialogue. Hitchcock is a master of mysterious suggestion; here he has used most of his usual tricks and several new ones to convey an uncanny sense of expectancy in almost every scene. So,

although the film runs for more than’ two hours, it seems to be over in half that time. Like a good book, it grips from first fade-in to last fade-out. Note for cynics: The appearance on this page of an advertisement for " Rebecca" bears no relation to the enthusiastic contents of this review.