Rebecca (1940)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

This film represents one of the things Alfred Hitchcock does best, and that is to work within the Hollywood studio system to craft a cerebral, but still accessible, psychological thriller. The movie has the spine of a typical Hollywood romance, but Hitchcock succeeds in riffing on the shadows of the past and how they can continue to haunt us forever. In the movie, Laurence Olivier's character marry's Joan Fontaine's character, and as she moves into his enormous mansion she finds that she has taken the place of his old wife (Rebecca), a woman who has evidently left some very big shoes to fill. The period in the film when Fontaine first moves into his mansion is the films best, because that's when we realize what Fontaine has gotten herself into. It's marvelous how Hitchcock creates the presence of Rebecca to be so eerie without ever showing her.

The romance of the film is not all that romantic because it's obvious early on that this is a woman who has married a man who wants her to be something else. It's a doomed romance from the get-go, and because of that the movie doesn't feel like a traditional Hollywood romance, instead it feels more like a gothic tragic romance, something much more unique for 1940's Hollywood. But as refreshing as this film is, Rebecca ends up morphing into a typical Hollywood murder mystery towards the end, when Rebecca's disappearance becomes a plot point and much of the tragedy goes away in favor of a murder mystery. The ending of the movie is significantly more uninteresting than the rest of the film, but besides that serious misstep, the movie is a wonderful gothic tragedy about a romance that is overshadowed by the past.

Grade: B+