Rebecca (1940)

It IS Rebecca!

It deserved the Best Picture Oscar.

Which it did, indeed, win.

CLASSIC Dl thread...

Didn't we just have one of these -- or was it My Cousin Rachel?

Dame Judith Anderson deserved to win Best Supporting Actress

Team Joan in the Joan vs Olivia sister feud.

Joan team

It’s a great movie. We watched it high school since we were reading the book, and we all thought the movie was silly, since we were stupid kids. NOW of course I think it’s fantastic. I watch it every few years.

I wish I had a morning room.

Coup de théâtre at 07:35

The sets and miniatures are fantastic. The whole world of the movie is beautifully designed.

Are we going to talk about the screen tests?

[quote]Dame Judith Anderson deserved to win Best Supporting Actress

Cecil B. DeMille was impressed with the strength of Anderson's performance and cast her in "The Ten Commandments" because of it.

I broke the china cupid!

Judith Anderson was brilliant. Her Big Momma in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was where I first noticed her not realizing she was the mean lady in Rebecca. I had no idea she was such an accomplished actress let alone a Brit. Her tragic southern matriarch was perfect.

On the other hand, I can't stand Joan Fontaine. Her acting style seems to be staring into the distance while reciting her lines.

R16 = Olivia.

I like Rebecca a lot, but The Grapes of Wrath should have won Best Picture. In fact, I might also prefer Hitchcock’s other Picture nominee—Foreign Correspondent, because that one is also enormously entertaining and feels like a Hitchcock movie first to last. With its lush production values and score, Rebecca seems as much Selznick as Hitchcock.

Also, the book is so much better. The movie is compromised by the Production Code, which of course would not allow Max to kill Rebecca without punishment. Doesn’t the movie have some convoluted A Place in the Sun-type twist where just as he wants to kill her she has a fatal accident?

It has been years since I’ve read it, but I remember thinking The Grapes of Wrath movie is actually an improvement on the book.

I recently bought the DVD version of this movie; it was so much more impressive than the crappy streaming versions. LO is perfect as Max and I love George Sanders as Rebecca's bitchy boyfriend. Wonderful movie

Judith Anderson was born in Australia R16

The scenes where Mrs. Danvers shows the second Mrs. De Winter Rebecca’s clothes is creepy af. “Feel THIS”, she says as she holds up a fur coat, rubbing the sleeve on the young woman’s face. It’s one of my favorite moments in the movie. The way she holds her dead mistress’s underwear. It was obvious that Mrs. Danvers had a thing for her.

The burning of the house is shot in such a cool way. Mrs. Danver's theatrical poses and the editing make it. Hitch knew what he was doing.

Discussing the scenes mentioned in R21:

Dame Judith Anderson was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived, along with Dame Edith Evans.

Rebecca (1940) screen tests Loretta Young Margaret Sullavan Vivien Leigh Joan Fontaine.

They remade Rebecca in the 2010's, it was so retro.

Joan Fontaine screen test.

Joan was perfect for this role and I think she deserved the Best Actress Oscar instead of Ginger “Woolface” Rogers.

They gave her one the next year essentially for Rebecca, r28.

Yep. R29 is right. SUSPICION is not a bad film but Not really Oscar worthy.

I love the screen tests.--they make it so clear why they went with Fontaine.

Leigh plays it like a minx, like Scarlett O'Hara, which is completely wrong for the part.

Sullavan is as always intelligent, but she plays it too neurotically.

Young gives the best reading of anyone, but she's far too glamorous for the role.

Hitchcock actually wanted Anne Baxter, who also has a very good screen test but who was too young (I think she was only 16 at the time--this was long before her ridiculous mannerisms had settled in, when she was actually quite a good natural actress).

Joan Fontaine was perfect. She's pretty without being glamorous, she's meek and eager to please, and she's very insecure.

Fontaine has so many great scenes in this. I love her controlled hysteria in the big scene with Judith Anderson in Rebecca's bedroom, but her finest scene is when Frank Crawley tells her how ravishingly beautiful Rebecca was, and Fonatine gives this sad defeated little half-smile... like this was exactly what she was expecting to hear, even though she knew it would depress her.

It’s a great movie, but it’s not the best movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was his introduction to Hollywood and was combined with well-known source material, so it’s not exactly his most Hitchcockian movie. The Best Director Oscar went to John Ford. Poor Alfie couldn’t catch a break with Hollywood.

Fun fact: Vivien Leigh was almost cast as the second Mrs. De Winter

^^Her husband Larry Olivier very much wanted her in it, but neither Hitchcock nor David O'Selznick wanted her for the part though to be polite they let her do the screen test linked above).

If you look at Joan Fontaine in the women it's like a test drive for the part in Rebecca.

I liked Sullavan best in the screen tests.

Dame Judith Anderson was the only choice for Mrs. Danvers

They had Hattie McDaniel as a backup.

Vivien Leigh screen test.

I always heard Marjorie Main was going to be the backup for Mrs. Danvers. She was going to play her as a colorful transplant from the USA!

Anne Baxter screen test.

Margaret Sullavan is wonderful but too American and also comes across as too smart.....like she'd never let JUdith Anderson get the best of her.

Vivien Leigh wins in the end because 1940 audiences, having just seen GWTW and aware of Leigh's romance with Olivier, could not help but imagine her as the titular character of Rebecca throughout the entire film.

Extended Loretta Young.

Young, Sullavan, Leigh....they all brought too much of their own personas to the screen tests. Of course, it helped the relatively less-known Fontaine. Plus she was just perfect for the role.

Margaret Sullavan extended.

[quote] Vivien Leigh wins in the end

I won in the end. I outlived them all.

As mentioned above, this initial Hollywood venture doesn’t feel very Hitchcock. He’d already established some great trademarks and tropes on his UK films like “The Lady Vanishes”, “The 39 Steps”, and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” that he’d revisit in later films but this was an anomaly of sorts.

SULLAVAN was too old for this role.

I thought it was well-known, at least among Hitchcock aficionados, that Selznick completely dominated Hitchcock and controlled every aspect of REBECCA even though he was supposedly in awe of the work he saw Hitch doing in England and brought him to Hollywood. Hitch found making the film a big disappointment and vowed never to allow a producer get in his way again.

But he would clash with David again.

One has to wonder why Olivia de Havilland doesn't seem to have been on the casting list for the 2nd Mrs. de Wynter. Perhaps her Warner's contract wouldn't allow her to audition, especially since they'd lost a year of her services during the making of GWTW.

It’s strange. I’ve done a lot of reading on both of them and I’ve never heard Hitchcock bring up Olivia or vice versa.

Their fighting was so stupid that they had to be siblings so I’m sure she just didn’t speak about him publicly after he cast her sister twice with big, money making results.

Olivia was among the final four considered, R53, and might have been cast if not for that greedy bastard Jack Warner. See the second paragraph under Casting in the link.

The girl is meant to be shy but not dumb. Olivia was dumb.

R51 But Hitchcock was still under contract to Selznick who loaned him out “by arrangement with David O. Selznick” and made two more films directly for him.

I have read that when it came to the day-to-day, on-set shooting, Hitchcock was mostly left alone, by Selznick standards, on Rebecca because Selznick was pre-occupied with finishing post-production and arranging the release of Gone with the Wind while it was shooting. A few years later when shooting Spellbound, again Selznick was busy with his next magnum opus, Duel in the Sun, and mostly left the shoot to Hitchcock.

It was the third time, The Paradine Case, when Selznick had no bigger project in the works (and Hitchcock had established himself in America) that Selznick’s constant interference became unbearable to Hitchcock.

A decade later John Huston lasted about a week on the shoot of the A Farewell to Arms remake, starring Mrs. Selznick, before he left the project—“creative differences.”

The remake was surprisingly good.

^One of the many aspects I like about the original movie versus the remake is that you can't quite figure out Max's motivation; he seems more fatherly to the narrator rather than a lover. So the narrator's insecurities seem justified: does Max really love her or is she just a pet - or as she later aptly says - someone so plain that locals won't gossip about. That insecurity makes her dominance by Mrs. Danvers and how oblivious Max is to the whole thing more plausible.

If that Wiki article is to be believed, I'm quite shocked to hear that Olivier was like the 6th or 7th choice for Max and was merely "settled" on by Selznick and Hitchcock. Was Rebecca released before or after Wuthering Heights?

And it's the only source I've read that Olivia De H was a contender.

Joan talks a little about the film in the first 4 minutes here.

Hitchcock & Selznick: Making Rebecca's Gothic Manderley (1940)

Tom Snyder was such a hot daddy!!!

Love this version -classic . Selznick films were amazing especially in this period

More on the prospect of Olivia as the second Mrs. de Winter. She was already committed to star in the vastly inferior Raffles while Rebecca was shooting. And she refused to screen test for the role since her sister was under contention.

The link above also claims that de Havilland was Selznick's first choice.

Hilarious now to read how so many of them thought only Anne Baxter of all people brought the appropriate "sincerity" to the role.

R60 Wuthering Heights was first.

If they were having the testers knit they should have given the big Hollywood knitter the chance - Joan Crawford.

Mrs. Danvers would have been scared shitless of Joan.

La-la-la...

The cast should have been:

Narrator- Bette Davis

Max- Charles Boyer

Mrs. Danvers- Angela Lansbury

Olivier wanted Leigh for the role. He was upset that she wasn’t cast and was supposedly a huge asshole to Fontaine

I'd much rather have seen Davis and Boyer in Rebecca instead of All This and Heaven Too. Lansbury, while always matronly, might have been a tad young at 13 for Danvers.

[quote]Lansbury, while always matronly

If Jack Warner wouldn't release Olivia he certainly wasn't going to release Bette.

R21 do understand that “underwear” did not literally mean her panties. LOL.

Danvers wasn’t “queer”—she was plain old nuts.

Someone could have done a prequel like the Ratched series but this time showing us Mrs. Danvers past. She was Mrs. and not Miss so was married at one point.

[quote] Doesn’t the movie have some convoluted A Place in the Sun-type twist where just as he wants to kill her she has a fatal accident?

This is true. I actually prefer the movie version, even though it softens it.

[quote] Someone could have done a prequel like the Ratched series but this time showing us Mrs. Danvers past

This is such a good idea that I’d be surprised if no one’s tried it yet.

Call Ryan Murphy.

Older women servants were often given the title of Mrs. amongst the aristocratic homes in which they served. Mrs. Hughes (even before she married Mr. Carson) and the unmarried Mrs. Patmore of our beloved Downtown Abby are just 2 examples.

Does Mrs. Danvers have a first name? I bet it's Dee Dee.

Though Warner did release Bette to Goldwyn for The Little Foxes, R76. It seems that if the money was right, he'd oblige. In Olivia's case, since she was already committed to another film while Rebecca was shooting, and she'd just been loaned out to Selznick for GWTW, no dice.

That was an attempt at humor about Lansbury, R75, though she did look quite dowdy in Gaslight.

R77, she was a lesbian. A negative stereotype of a lesbian, but a lesbian nonetheless.

Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca was a lesbian, fercrissakes!!!

R79 Softens but also stops making sense—why would Max go to a lot of effort to scuttle the body instead of just reporting an accident to the police?

Danvers was 100% lezbo