Part 1
I’m working on a new film which is going to take me a very long time, as I painstakingly rotoscope black and white footage to edit together a work based on Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. The film stars Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter, and Joan Fontaine as the otherwise unnamed new Mrs de Winter. Fontaine was not Hitch’s first choice for the rôle, having been selected by David O Selznick, the producer, who saw himself as a starmaker. The audition process for the part was particularly drawn out with 30 actresses considered and rejected, Hitch wanted Margaret Sullavan, Anne Baxter, then only 16, was the staff choice, but Selznick eventually had his way.
Du Maurier’s Rebecca is a troubling read, with it’s central gothic heroine rather insipid and unsympathetic despite her terrors and difficulties. She is the put-upon, gentle, shy and unthreatening epitome of many a romantic novel. Such passivity is also seen in victorian novellas, and in classic romantic heroines in Brontë and the like. You can still see the archetype today, in (perhaps not so) modern romances like Fifty Shades of Grey and the Twilight Saga. Here a passive, (mostly) virtuous heroine who is generally given to the gentle arts of drawing and music, not garish pastimes such as dancing and gambling, is put through various tests of her merits in order to win the love of a dark, brooding and virile man with a hidden, dangerous or shameful past. Through the course of the story, the hero is redeemed of his past and rewarded with a gentle helpmeet and true love.
Rebecca herself is aligned with Rochester’s mad wife in the attic. Possibly gay, certainly a fast woman with loose morals, too beautiful and desirable to be good. Too sexy. And altogether too modern a woman, taking control of her life through her affairs, manipulating her husband and being the centre of attention of the whole county. Perhaps this is why the book is so troubling to read, the most interesting character is at the bottom of the sea for the entirety of the story.
Hitchcock states in his interviews with François Truffaut that the Rebecca is really a book of the last century despite it being published in 1938, (his film was made in 1940) he calls it an old fashioned story, and not ‘a Hitchcock picture’. Du Maurier had already been appalled by Hitchcock’s version of her novel Jamaica Inn, he certainly took licence, adding characters and significantly changing the tone. Now under contract to Selznick however Hitch was forced to produce a more faithful adaptation. Selznick was convinced that the recent huge success of Gone With The Wind was in part due to it’s staying true to Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, and that the readers of the books would surely flock to a faithful screen version, which they did, it was a huge financial and critical success, garnering an oscar for Joan Fontaine’s insipid and coy Mrs de Winter.
Hitchcock’s record with his leading ladies is fascinatingly romantic too. And many of his films are, sometimes alarmingly, autobiographical. His relationship with his wife Alma was almost certainly almost always a sexless one. He saved his romantic feelings and gestures for his favourite actresses. Most notably Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and notoriously Tippi Hedren. His fascination with disturbing the composure of an icy blonde, his disgust with his own physical attributes, the sexual inadequacy hinted at in gossip, the scatalogical and sexually perverse schoolboy humour. And the horror of course, and fear, are a heady mix and go some way to explain the complexities of his movies. He was technologically adventurous, artistically gifted and absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of his own vision.
to be cont.
