Not to be flip or disrespectful but Rebecca isn't one for the ages. As Alfred Hitchcock's first American film after a number of triumphs in his native Britain, including The Thirty-Nine Steps and Sabotage, his 1940 movie about a woman living in the shadow of her new husband's dead first wife is less interesting the more you think about it. In fact, it's downright simplistic and requires too many leaps of faith about characterization, motivation and seemingly coincidental plot points to enliven its occasionally exciting action.

Admittedly, though, it's a lush affair of the deepest black and white chromatic colors arranged from the brightness of light to the darkness of absolute night. In between is sandwiched a sumptuous group of performances, a rich symphonic score and some characteristically eerie camera angles and tricks that had already begun to fill-out the director's stock in trade. Despite all this cleverness and technical brilliance Rebecca just isn't a great production even when considering the lasting touches that stay in one's memory largely due to the enduring power of the actors and their bits of improvised physical business.

Tagged with the statement, "The shadow of this woman darkened their love", Rebecca begins with a special effects-driven shot of a camera moving through the ruins of grand estate. In voice-over accompaniment a woman explains how all the crushed grandeur within the frame was the result of odd circumstances that for her began one day along the southern French coast.

Cutting quickly to her flashback and story, the always-unnamed female narrator is revealed as a young woman (Joan Fontaine) working as a professional companion to an aged and overbearing know-it-all named Mrs. Van Hopper (Florence Bates). Wandering along the cliffs near Monty Carlo she helps avert the apparent suicide attempt of Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), a widower gentleman, who then takes a liking to the girl and quickly sweeps her offer her feet.

They drive together in the county, flirt and he comes to cherish her youthful innocence. Throughout their fast courtship he withholds information about his dead first wife, with whom he's rumored to be hopelessly devoted, just as his new lady friend conceals their romance from her jet-setting employer. In the end, he proposes marriage and she accepts thus setting in motion the intrigue at the center of the film.

Arriving at the de Winter estate an hour's drive from London, the house staff under the direction of Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) coldly greets their returning lord and his new wife. Learning quickly that her household was run entirely by Rebecca in concert with Mrs. Danvers, Mrs. de Winter slowly comes to feel like an interloper in her own home. Based on Rebecca as the preferred model of behavior she learns how she's supposed to eat breakfast, take appointments, plan parties, dress and how to organize the staff. Most importantly she's made to feel inferior, stupid and impossibly dull in comparison with the sophistication and skill of her predecessor.

Slowly she comes to believe wholeheartedly in Maxim's devotion to Rebecca even while piecing together the unusual circumstances of her death on the high seas. She also meets a shady "cousin" called Jack Favell (George Sanders) who seems in cahoots with Mrs. Danvers in an unknown conspiracy against her. Distrustful of Favell and questioning her sanity Mrs. de Winter confronts Maxim to sort out their affairs but is left believing in his devotion to Rebecca's memory that will forever leave her an old maid.

After a number of unusual, ghostly sightings, a boating accident uncovers Rebecca's body in the boat that had served as her watery tomb. Maxim's explanation of how she died seems unlikely and then he breaks down to confess the first of the film's two major surprises. Opposite the rumors and behavior attached to his life, Maxim hated Rebecca because she was an adulteress who revealed her true colors only after securing her marriage into the de Winter family. Having uncovered her plot to conceive an heir to his fortune with her lover Favell, Maxim instead struck her in a fit of rage whereupon she struck her head on some boating tackle that killed her.

Believing their life together ending, Maxim and Mrs. de Winter resolve to lie about what really happened even though Favell has caught on to the truth of the matter without any proof. Confronted with an exhumed body, new physical evidence and explanations that don't hold water, Rebecca's final days are traced to finally end up with a London-based doctor whose revelation is startling to say the least.

Not only was Rebecca cheating on her husband and thought herself to be caring her lover's child, she was also dying from inoperable cancer. The final confrontation between her and Maxim was nothing more than a conceit planned to soil is reputation and in that final effort she was nearly successful.

With all parties satisfied save one, Maxim returns home from London to find his ancestral home ablaze. Mrs. de Winter is safe outside with the other servants except for Mrs. Danvers whose fanatical devotion to Rebecca led her to set the house afire, bringing her own life to an end in the process.

She may have been called, "The MOST GLAMOROUS WOMAN of All Time!" but Rebecca operates as nothing more than a red herring to provide the undoing and eventual rekindling of a spooky aristocrat's second marriage. Her presence lingers over the picture bearing her name as the second Mrs. de Winter slinks through hallways, confronts hostile servants and friends and goes to war with the architecture of her home, everywhere at odds with comfort and kindness.

To that extent Hitchcock's manipulation of the plot brings attention to bear on Mrs. de Winter's struggle with demons that predate her. Inasmuch as that demon is the purpose of the film and source of its two narrative reversals, much of the movie becomes an exercise in futility. There's simply no way to expect Maxim's animosity towards Rebecca or Rebecca's finally revealed terminal illness. Where this might have led to a thrilling conclusion it instead closes the narrative conflicts without much satisfaction.

Maxim and Mrs. de Winter end up together though it's inexplicable exactly why. Favell ends up depraved and indifferent to the hurt and pain he's caused in others and Mrs. Danvers kills herself in slavish devotion that borders on unrequited love.

I'm normally one to treasure the small points of reversal in movie stories but for some reason this tendency wasn't born out in Rebecca. Rather than feeling excited and shocked by its conclusion I felt only dismay that so much effort had been brought to the production of a film that ends up being a straightforward joke masquerading as a mystery thriller.

Perhaps most interestingly Olivier originally wanted his then-girlfriend Vivien Leigh cast in the film opposite him. When she wasn't offered the role he went on to treat Fontaine horribly throughout the production. Ever the manipulator of hearts and minds, Hitchcock recognized how this treatment shook up the actress and so he told her the entire cast and crew shared Olivier's unpleasantness. Thus believing everyone in the production hated her, Fontaine was shy and uneasy on set and this contributed to the kind of performance most sought after by the director. Interestingly it's also the demonstration of a habit about eliciting the preferred performances from his actors and actresses that he collectively referred to as being cow-like on more than one occasions.

Following wide public and critical celebration Rebecca went on to compete with All This, and Heaven Too, Foreign Correspondent, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town and The Philadelphia Story for the Outstanding Production Academy Award of 1940. Its overall technical merit, highly renowned cast, no expense spared production style and popular pedigree in Daphne Du Maurier's best selling novel of the same name eventually contributed to its tide of success. So too did producer David O. Selznick who was riding the cresting wave of his career's highest achievements after having won the picture of the year award for Gone with the Wind in 1939.

The movie is everywhere awash with the richness of cinematic possibility and enjoyed the benefit of innovations hard won on previous films through handy experiments with set and art design. Flooded with a large budget and such skilled special effects technicians as Jack Cosgrove and Arthur Johns, Rebecca was also a technical marvel with very few films to rival its scope and audacity. In fact, there are premonitions of Citizen Kane in certain of the key sequences with their depth of field, tracking camera sequences, composition across multiple planes of activity and the iconographic wicked old house standing at the two films' center. While Hitchcock's film capitalized on these elements to tease out the unusual effects of a woman's spirit living on in her husband's home, Orson Welles used the same inspiration to layer the disintegration of a man beneath his own weighty corruption.

There the comparison ends in that Rebecca is not as thrilling as later Hitchcock films although it benefits from the wonderful performances of its cast, but most especially of Olivier, Sanders and Anderson. While Fontaine is perhaps correct for the central role, and while her vulnerability was hard won through strict unpleasantness, her character's devotion to Maxim is assumed from the start without much motivation. Forced to accept this condition as the bedrock of the film, her role is then run through the ringer in having to portray her devotion to a cold and callous estate that would do her harm at every turn.

Ultimately, of course, we learn that Rebecca isn't really at the center of Maxim's heart and is therefore no special person but merely a manipulative and calculated user of people with gentler spirits. As a concluding point this theme about consistent evil in the unlikeliest of people would find its heartiest expression in Hitchcock's later work. Too bad for Rebecca it didn't come together here for it's the mark against an otherwise magnificently produced movie. oubles that stem from it.