Rebecca. When a naive young woman marries a rich widower and settles in his gigantic mansion, she finds the memory of the first wife maintaining a grip on her husband and the servants.
In the summer before my sophomore year, I had the summer project of reading the novel Rebecca and found the mystery/drama quite enjoyable. After discovering the novel had a movie adaptation in the top 100 list, I was intrigued to see how Alfred Hitchcock (the director) had taken the novel to the big screen.
As the movie opened with the opening monologue, I instantly remembered reading the novel and the beautiful chill it created. The reading done by Joan Fontaine (the second Mrs. de Winter) combines not only the elegant poetry of the words, but the chill of eerie reveal of Manderley.
As for how well the movie follows the plot of the book, I would have to say it does so far better than I thought it would have. Seeing the movie was like stepping back in time and rereading the pages once more.
The credit given for the plot of the movie should only be awarded to Daphne du Maurier who was the author of the original book. The plot combines a variety of genres together to create a mysterious, enchanting, romantic, and chilling story of the late Rebecca and how fluental she is of the second Mrs. de Winter even after her death. Although she is not a seen or heard from character from the book, she is one of the most lively because of her tales from those who knew her. Perhaps this is why she could candidate for being the most interesting character in the story.
What won me over however was the acting within the movie. Joan Fontaine plays the role of the awkward and shy Mrs. de Winter perfectly. Somehow she managed to portray the quiet and out of place character without going over the thin line of becoming obnoxious. Every moment you see her in the movie you have a sense of compassion for she has to compete for the love of a man with a woman who cannot even breathe.
Laurence Olivier should always be acknowledged for his role as Maxim de Winter. For almost all of the movie (besides about the last half hour), Maxim is seen as a melancholy widower who has quite the short temper when in reality his morose attitude comes from the murderer he committed so long ago. Even though he hated Rebecca, Maxim still must have felt a weight of grief on his shoulders for every second of his life and Olivier portrays this perfectly.
The woman who amazed me the most in her performance, however, was Judith Anderson who played the strange and spiteful Mrs. Danvers. Anderson is able to have the haunting sense of distaste towards Mrs. de Winters throughout the whole movie because she knows Mrs. Danvers loved Rebecca like a child and now there is another woman who she believes does not deserve the same rank as her former mistress. The tension only builds between Mrs. de Winters and Mrs. Danvers as the maid eventually makes Mrs. de Winters crack down crying after stating that she will never amount to the level of perfection Rebecca achieved. This moment of the film is perhaps my favorite purely from Anderson's performance. She lets the character of Mrs. Danvers overtake her and portrays the hatred which has built within Mrs. Danvers magnificently.
The tension rises as Rebecca comes back for one final time in trying to sentence Maxim to a life in jail and with the build up from discovering who Rebecca is, how she actually died, and what will result from Maxim's action are what make the plot of Rebecca so enticing. The acting of not only the main actors and the supporting ones makes the movie so enjoyable and entertaining for those who view it. Me personally, I found this movie just as satisfying as the novel it is based off of and give it a rating 5 stars. *****
No comments:
Post a Comment