6/30/2023 0 Comments Rebecca movieWhen he asks her to come to Manderley with him, she wonders, “As your secretary?” and he recites one of the novel’s notable lines: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.” The screenplay has wiped out most of the other period touches that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in the 30s. James, with a blonde bob and a tentative manner, effectively makes her love-struck as they drive along the sparkling coast, and innocent enough to ignore warning signs about Maxim’s past. You can’t blame the heroine for falling for the excitement he offers, though. There’s a difference between hiding something and just being dull. Maxim is meant to be mysterious, but throughout the film Hammer makes him opaque. The setting is the late-1930s but he looks like a refugee from The Great Gatsby a decade earlier. Maxim turns up, Armie Hammer in a mustard-yellow suit, driving a cream-coloured convertible. Soon we are in Monte Carlo, where the heroine is travelling as paid companion to the gauche American Mrs Van Hopper (the well-cast Ann Dowd). But this brief, elliptical opening seems like an obligation, not an ominous clue. It begins with the narrator’s voiceover of the book’s famous first line, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” a dream in which the house is in ruins. The flatness is there even when you take the film out of Hitchcock’s shadow. The film even lends itself to a feminist reading, with the heroine a woman who learns to come into her own. Joan Fontaine’s subservience as the heroine, an extreme version of what society accepted at the time, plays more strongly now as a sign of her self-doubt. What are the best first lines in fiction?Īlfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film has become a classic, of course: a psychological thriller that brilliantly translated the novel’s Gothic atmosphere to the screen, demonstrating how well Du Maurier’s story could morph over time. Why Daphne du Maurier was Britain’s mistress of suspense The Gothic plot is enough to make the novel work, but the themes of self-doubt and a marriage fraught with secrets are what make it endure, and such a rich source for adaptation. The second Mrs de Winter becomes the ill-prepared mistress of Maxim’s great estate of Manderley, where her timidity is no match for the villainous housekeeper Mrs Danvers or the lingering spectre of Rebecca. His impossibly glamourous first wife, Rebecca, had died in an unexplained shipwreck. How could she compete with a ghost? Du Maurier channelled that anxiety into her 1938 bestseller about a mousy young woman, a never-named narrator who marries Maxim de Winter. Several years before, she had discovered letters to her husband from his beautiful former fiancée, who had taken her own life. Daphne du Maurier wrote the novel Rebecca inspired by jealousy and insecurity, but it all turned out great in the end.
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