Rebecca

When you’re watching a Hitchcock movie, it’s a sublime experience as you let yourself go to a grand master. Hitchcock moves the film along perfectly. It’s a simplistic story, but his flairs are at once apparent and riveting. Beginning with a young, nameless girl who acts as a lowly servant to a pudgy mistress vacationing by the sea, we see an innocent and beautifully photographed Joan Fontaine as she is swept away by Maxim de Winter. She’s brought to a vast, cultured castle and is expected to adopt all of the habits of her predecessor, Rebecca de Winter. Through trickery and deception, she occasionally makes a fool of herself, breaking things and sitting at the end of a long table filling the seat of a woman supposedly better than her. Everything she does is contrasted against Rebecca, and Hitchcock illustrates this in one stunning shot that backs up from a close-up on Fontaine’s fidgety face to the massive room she solitarily inhabits. The plot grows more complicated, and there are hidden truths about the former Mrs. de Winter that are inevitably revealed, but what’s at the center of Hitchcock’s first American film is an exclusively American girl (Fontaine), who’s swept up by all the style and secrets of a grand castle, burned down by her innocence and novelty in a world that expects something different, but, from the inside, burns down into modernity.

★★★★★/5