notes on Rebecca (1940)

Here are more thoughts on Hitchcock’s Rebecca, as a supplement to my post on this movie and others from 1940. For thoughts on the orchestral score, jump down to the middle of this post.

SPOILER ALERT: These notes discuss the whole plot of Rebecca including the ending, so I don’t recommend reading this post unless you’ve seen the movie.

If you copy and paste anything from these original notes by me, please credit me AND link to this post (or the blog’s homepage). To emphasize what it says at the bottom of every post on this website: Copyright © 2021-2024 by John Althouse Cohen. All rights reserved.

🌊   The first scene of Rebecca is unusual in two ways. We see no people — only an eerie, imposing building after dark. And the scene is narrated by a woman (Joan Fontaine), at a time when movie narration was overwhelmingly male. This scene tells us that this movie is going to be filtered through the woman’s perspective, even if men are more outwardly dominant.

🌊   Laurence Olivier’s rich character boasts “a very impressive array of first names”: his full name is George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter, but people call him “Maxim” or “Max.” His imposing names tower over Joan Fontaine’s character, who keeps living in other people’s shadows. We never find out her first name! (So I’ll keep calling her “Fontaine”).

🌊   The first people we see in the movie are the two main characters. First we see Max standing on the edge of a cliff with dramatic music. But when Fontaine — a stranger who shows up on a lower level — urges him not to jump, this first encounter between the future spouses isn’t accentuated with any striking music or camerawork. That prepares us to settle in to a movie that isn’t going to spoon-feed us a clear message from the beginning; we’ll get to know them only gradually, as the movie goes on. (The point about the lack of cinematic emphasis on their first encounter is from the excellent Criterion blu-ray commentary by Leonard J. Leff.)

🌊   In that scene, Max wryly tells his future wife: “Get on with your walking, and don’t hang about here, screaming.” As with most Hitchcock movies, there are some comical moments even though the movie as a whole is far from a comedy. One of the most overt jokes happens in the next scene, when Mrs. Van Hopper (Florence Bates) gushes: “Most women would give their eyes to see Monte Carlo!” Max wrly retorts: “Wouldn’t that rather defeat the purpose?” In the scene after that, Max invites Fontaine to lunch but assures her: “We needn’t talk to each other if we don’t feel like it.” (That could be the inspiration for a season 1 episode of Seinfeld, “Male Unbonding,” where Jerry suggests going to a cafe, and Elaine responds: “I’ll go if we don’t have to talk.”)

🌊   A seemingly frivolous line by Fontaine to Max in one of their early scenes turns out to be significant: “You’re not an easy subject to sketch — your expression keeps changing all the time.”

🌊   Possibly the weirdest dialogue in the movie: Fontaine spontaneously exclaims, while riding in Max’s car: “Oh! I wish I were a woman of 36, dressed in black satin and a string of pearls!” Max responds ominously: “Please promise me never to wear black satin or pearls. Or to be 36 years old.” (See the video below at 4:14 and 5:20.) When they later get engaged, Max again reveals that he dreads the prospect of her becoming mature: “It’s a pity you have to grow up” (right before he orders her to pour his coffee for him). Then at Manderley, after talking to Crawley (Reginald Denny) about Rebecca, Fontaine greets Max wearing a black dress and pearl necklace. Max doesn’t mention that she broke the “promise” or insist that she change clothes, but he says the outfit “doesn’t seem your type at all.” He finally does control what his wife wears when she unwittingly dresses as Rebecca, and he orders her to change into something else.

🌊   When Mrs. Van Hopper is about to exit the movie after learning of the couple’s engagement, she looks Fontaine up and down and scoffs: “Huh! Mrs. DeWinter!” Once Fontaine moves in to Manderley, Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, casts a similarly judgmental glare on Fontaine, repeatedly looking her up and down. Fontaine, feeling the weight of the constant scrutiny, confides to her husband: “I try my best every day, but it’s very difficult with people looking me up and down as if I were a prize cow.” This persistent theme of Fontaine being looked up and down brings home the way she can’t seem to escape the shadow of Rebecca or Manderley.

🌊   To make Fontaine seem small in the vast mansion, the movie often frames her in parts of the house that are unusually large or high up, such as doorknobs positioned almost at the same level as her head. (This observation comes from the Criterion commentary by Leff.)

🌊   When Danvers first shows Fontaine the closed-off west wing — the only part of the mansion with “a view of the sea” (calling to mind Rebecca’s death) — and adds that “it was Mrs. DeWinter’s room,” we don’t see Fontaine’s face, but a subtle movement in her exposed back reveals that Danvers has sent a shiver down her spine. (Again, Leff notes this in his Criterion commentary.)

🌊   The couple of Beatrice (Gladys Cooper) and Giles (Nigel Bruce) are minor characters, but they balance out the main couple with a gender reversal: Beatrice, Max’s sister, talks down to Giles and orders him around (“You’re very much in the way!”), mirroring the way Max treats Fontaine. A little later, Beatrice comes close to revealing Fontaine’s first name when talking to Max: “Everyone’s dying to see you and … uh … !” Beatrice gestures toward Fontaine but leaves her name unsaid. So Beatrice can’t quite remember the new bride’s first name — while you can be sure no one is forgetting the name Rebecca.

🌊   One of my favorite lines in the movie is Fontaine’s response to the beach hermit, Ben (Leonard Carey), when he says: “She’s gone in the sea, ain’t she? She’ll never come back no more?” Fontaine: “No … shhhe’ll never come back.” Great delivery of that line, as if she’s forcing herself to be assertive even though she’s unsure if she’s right. (You can watch the scene here; that exchange starts at 7:40.)

🌊   After Fontaine returns from seeing Ben, Max tells her, “We should never have come back to Manderley,” mirroring Fontaine’s voice-over in the first scene: “We can never go back to Manderley.”

📽   I love the scene where they watch happy moments of themselves in a homemade film, while discussing whether they’re truly happy together. In many other romantic movies, I feel frustrated by not knowing enough about the couple to feel like they have a strong foundation, but a scene like this lets us see so many sides to their relationship.

🌊   There’s a crucial line that a first-time viewer could easily overlook: Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) shows Fontaine something in Rebecca’s room that you think is going to be a pillowcase but turns out to be a lingerie container resting on top of the pillowcase, while Danvers says: “I embroidered this case for her myself, and I keep it here for her always.” The way Danvers words that sentence repeatedly connects herself to Rebecca: she puts the words “her” and “myself” next to each other, then says “I keep it here for her always,” expressing undying devotion to the dead woman. In a later scene, Fontaine instinctively throws herself into the case and cries, before looking up in dread at the embroidered “R.” Ironically, Danvers will not “keep” the case as she said, but will soon destroy herself in that room along with many symbols of Rebecca including the embroidered “R” case.

🌊   Fontaine shrinks away in horror when Danvers holds up Rebecca’s lingerie and says, “Look! You can see my hand through it!” That’s about as far as any American movie of the time could have gone in hinting at lesbian sexuality. (See the video below this photo.) Also: “I always used to wait up for her, no matter how late. Sometimes she and Mr. DeWinter didn’t come home until dawn. While she was undressing, she’d tell me about the party she’d been to.”

🌊   One of the most quoted lines of the movie is after the Danvers/Fontaine clothing scene. Danvers is stunned when Fontaine orders her to get rid of “Mrs. DeWinter’s things,” meaning Rebecca’s correspondence and so on that were being stored in Fontaine’s desk — and Fontaine defiantly shoots back: “I am Mrs. DeWinter now.” Less famous, but even more bold, is what Fontaine says after that: “In fact, I’d prefer to forget everything that happened this afternoon” — meaning the whole scene where Danvers showed Fontaine Rebecca’s bedroom. (This scene starts at 6:30 in the video below.)

🌊   In the big scene where Max confesses to his wife, he says Rebecca “told me all about herself — everything! Things I’ll never tell a living soul! I wanted to kill her!” Max later gives some specifics about cheating, but presumably he doesn’t tell his wife “everything” about Rebecca — he said he’d “never” do that. What was it that he couldn’t bring himself to say, or that the censors wouldn’t allow him to say in 1940? That Rebecca was a bisexual woman who had an affair with Mrs. Danvers?

🌊   We rarely hear Max say what he likes about his wife, but later in the day, he holds her head in his hands and stares at her while telling her: “It’s gone forever! That funny, young, lost look I loved won’t ever come back. I killed that when I told you about Rebecca. … In a few hours, you’ve grown so much older.” His disappointment that she seems “older” calls to mind his request for her never “to be 36 years old.” Max’s comment suggests that her youth and naivety make her an ideal wife — if only she could stay frozen in time, free from the weight of knowing the dark truth about Max’s first marriage. While fixated on his wife’s age, Max may be still struggling to cope with his own loss of innocence. (ChatGPT contributed to the last two sentences.)

🌊   The movie loses some of its interest when everyone leaves Manderley for the coroner’s inquest into Rebecca’s death. Fontaine doesn’t have much to do in this section, but you can sense that she’s grown into a more mature and self-possessed woman.

🔥   The end of the movie connects to the beginning: the movie starts after Danvers burns down the mansion, and the rest of the movie is a flashback. It’s as if the end is inviting you to start watching it over again on a loop. Or the movie could have gone in chronological order, starting with Max gazing at the sea. Then the intro would’ve been an epilogue, and the last line would’ve been: “We can never go back to Manderley — that much is certain.” One might remember that line from the beginning as a mental voice-over for the ending. They’ll have to rebuild their lives without rebuilding their old house.

Notes on watching the movie with no dialogue, only Franz Waxman’s orchestral score (an extra on the Criterion blu-ray and DVD):

🎻   The opening credits start with “Rebecca’s theme,” a melody that’s heavily chromatic, often moving a half step at a time, giving it an eerie, disorienting, floating feeling. Chromatic movement can sometimes feel random, but it doesn’t in this melody, which is calculated to move quickly from a major note down a half step to a minor note that’s sustained for an awkwardly long time. That odd turn gives the melody a quizzical quality, and hints that warm or optimistic feelings can suddenly turn cold or sour. Rebecca’s theme starts at the 29-second mark of this video:

🎻   When the couple first meets, we hear a clarinet tentatively play a slow melodic fragment that’s mostly in a major key but surprisingly ends on a minor third (4:22 - :40). That unresolved melody is easy to forget — it seems to go nowhere. But it will later turn into a full-fledged orchestral theme, “the Love theme,” when the couple gets married, in what seem to be the only purely carefree moments of the movie (27:46, 27:57, 28:16). This lush version of the Love theme is in a major key and feels passionately romantic, in contrast with Rebecca’s theme, which feels solitary and unsettling.

🎻   This analysis of the score by Jonathan Broxton, a critic of film scores, identifies 10 melodic themes, each representing a different character or thing (e.g. there’s one for Manderley). Broxton points out that Waxman used the “familiar sounds of the acoustic orchestra” for the characters we seen on the screen — but for Rebecca, who’s dead, Waxman used “a non-acoustic ‘ghost orchestra’, which achieved a not of this world ambiance through use of an electric organ, and two polyphonic Novachords – the prototype of the modern synthesizer.”

🎻   Danvers is introduced with a chromatic, irregular melody that resembles Rebecca’s theme — but less beautiful and less resolved (30:35). Broxton’s analysis says the score at this point “channels” Rebecca’s theme instead of fully playing Danvers’s theme, because Waxman believed “it was best to keep her subtle and lurking as it was too soon in the narrative for her (and her music) to overtly challenge the new bride.”

🎻   The Rebecca and Danvers themes get crossed again when Danvers catches Fontaine unthinkingly telling someone on the phone that “Mrs. DeWinter” is dead (40:08), before realizing right when she hangs up that she’s Mrs. DeWinter now.

🎻   We briefly hear only the middle of Rebecca’s theme when Beatrice reveals to Fontaine that Danvers “simply adored Rebecca” (43:35). In the next scene, again, only part of Rebecca’s theme is played when Giles (Max’s brother-in-law) puts his foot in his mouth by alluding to drowning in front of Max (44:45). After those snippets, we finally hear the whole Rebecca’s theme after Fontaine meets the beach hermit, Ben, and enters the room where (she’ll later find out) her husband and Rebecca had their fateful confrontation (48:52).

🎻   When Fontaine goes back to Max after meeting Ben, Waxman’s music seems to have inspired Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s 1958 movie Vertigo (49:45). Listen to this part of the Rebecca score, and then this part of an orchestral suite from the Vertigo score.

🎻   Rebecca’s theme softly creeps in as Crawley tells Fontaine about Rebecca (52:58), underscoring her lingering presence.

🎻   The couple’s homemade film is mostly shown with no music, but the Love theme returns at the end of the scene (1:02:10).

🎻   When Fontaine enters Rebecca’s room and is eventually found by Danvers, we hear Rebecca’s theme — at first in incomplete fragments played by one instrument after another in a disorienting manner (1:07:30 - 1:08:00), and then in a fuller, more confident form by strings in unison with a harp in the background (1:08:08 - :29). Visible motions that bring out features of the room are accented by pretty musical effects, such as harp glissandos when the curtains are opened by Fontaine and then Danvers (1:08:00, 1:09:07), and when Danvers sensually strokes Rebecca’s fur coat against her face and then Fontaine’s (1:09:37, :44). Before Danvers enters, Fontaine nervously touches Rebecca’s hair brush but instantly darts her hand away as if she accidentally touched a hot stove, at which point Rebecca’s theme becomes louder (1:08:14). Later, Danvers notices that the hair brush is slightly out of place and moves it back into position, and around that time a cello repeatedly interjects with a two-note descending motif that sounds like whimpering (1:10:40 - 1:11:01). (These times refer to the whole movie, not this clip of that scene.)

🎻   The next scene starts with Fontaine alone, calling Danvers on the phone and then rifling through Rebecca’s papers, while we hear a more turbulent version of Rebecca’s theme, as if we were suddenly dropping in on the middle of the “development” section of the first movement of a symphony in “sonata form.” A few seconds later, when Fontaine tells Danvers, “I am Mrs. DeWinter now,” forte strings respond with an unsubtle burst of triumphant joy, like a musical exclamation mark at that end of that sentence. That’s the only musical moment I don’t like in this otherwise-great score; I wish Waxman had let Fontaine’s bold declaration speak for itself. We’re relieved to hear the Love theme when Fontaine heads toward the door to meet Max (1:14:30), but then Rebecca’s theme intrudes when Fontaine tells Danvers on the way out, “In fact, I’d prefer to forget everything that happened this afternoon” (referring to the scene in Rebecca’s bedroom), and the camera lingers on Danvers’s sinister expression as Fontaine rushes over to Max.

🎻   Most of the score is in a 19th-century Romantic style as expected for a Hollywood movie of this time period — but the music takes a turn toward minimalism when Fontaine chillingly stares out the window while Danvers encourages her to jump to her death (1:23:40 - 1:24:01). For those agonizing 20 seconds, the same few notes repeat over and over with almost no variation, as if Fontaine feels stuck, with nowhere to go either physically or mentally.

🎻   In a mysteriously foggy nighttime scene, Crawley gives Fontaine the news about Rebecca’s body while we hear a restrained version of Rebecca’s theme. Then as Fontaine wanders toward the abandoned cottage where Max is sitting alone, we hear a variation of the Love theme which no longer sounds romantic; it’s ominously slowed down and heavy, drained of the light, carefree quality it once had, and left unresolved (1:26:14).

🎻   In the last scene, when Max first arrives at the mansion going down in flames, not knowing where his wife is, we hear the Love theme — but it’s barely recognizable (2:08:47). Until now we had generally heard that melody in a comfortably moderate tempo and a reassuring major key, but now the Love theme is frantically paced and in a minor key. Waxman uses the same technique I’ve mentioned before (when Rebecca’s theme accompanies Fontaine gathering Rebecca’s papers): he takes a melody we’ve heard many times, but dramatically transforms it as in a symphony. When the couple reunites and embraces, we briefly hear the Love theme in its usual form, resolved and major (2:09:13) … but that sweet melody quickly disintegrates into hellishly dissonant orchestral chords that sound like they’re going out of control, untethered from any sense of “key,” while the couple watches flames destroying their home (2:09:20). As the camera enters Rebecca’s room, where Danvers is maniacally staying after lighting the fire, the chaotic music is eventually drowned out by the crashing sounds of toppling beams. Soon the music returns with aggressive stabs of dissonance that roughly outline the beginning of Rebecca’s theme, as the camera slowly approaches Rebecca’s old bed (2:10:03). At the very end, these horrifying sights and sounds are beautifully transformed when we see the case on top of the pillow with the embroidered letter “R” for Rebecca burning up, and we hear the Love theme once more, now fully resolved (2:10:27). Love has won.

Click here for a shorter post about Rebecca and my other favorite movies of 1940, and here for the full list of my favorite movies of each year from 1920 to 2020.

Copyright © 2021-2023 by John Althouse Cohen. All rights reserved.