Hitchcock's Best Picture

According to Oscar, anyway. Though probably the most famous director in the history of film, Alfred Hitchcock, only directed one movie which won Best Picture. That film was Rebecca. It was also nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Laurence Olivier), Best Actress (Joan Fontaine), Best Supporting Actress (Judith Anderson), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Sherwood), although it did not win any of those awards.

A young - and nameless - woman (Fontaine), working as a paid traveling companion to a wealthy but obnoxious old woman, meets widowed millionaire Maxim de Winter (Olivier). The two have a whirlwind two week romance, leading to de Winter asking the young lady to marry him in order to avoid losing her when her employer decides to travel elsewhere. The young lady is at first thrilled to accept his proposal, but begins to have her doubts when she realizes that she does not fit in at his elegant mansion, trying to engage with his friends and family and to maintain the house and its staff. Her doubts are intensified by Maxim's occasional episodes of sudden, uncontrollable rage, by the ever-present memories of his first wife, Rebecca, and by the intense hatred she gets from Mrs Danvers (Anderson), the main servant of the house, who was intensely dedicated to the first Mrs de Winter.

This is not a typical Hitchcock film. The light, yet macabre, sense of humor that is such a trademark of his style is almost entirely abandoned here in favor of a much darker, more serious tone. The change is not unwelcome, though, and it clearly worked for him as far as Oscar was concerned. The characters are much more developed than in most of Hitchcock's work - in many of his films, the characters are just there for the story to happen to, but here they are rich and realistic. The viewer can identify with and care about them, as opposed to just watching them on the screen. I mean, it's hard not to identify with the second Mrs. de Winter in her fear and discomfort at trying to fit into this new situation that bears no resemblance to the rest of her life leading up to it, or with Maxim once the viewer discovers the reason behind his strange behavior - a plot twist that I will not reveal here.

Rebecca is probably the least Hitchcockian of Hitchcock's films, and probably not the one I would choose to introduce a newcomer to Hitchcock's work, or to satisfy a craving to watch something Hitchcock. It is, however, a compelling and rewarding film, definitely worth watching.

Movie trivia question: Another unfair on, but I didn't hear any complaints last time. This film, for which I am currently being waitlisted on Netflix, is the only Oscar winner of the 1980s (for the 8 categories that I concern myself with here) that I have not yet seen. I'm about to close out a decade!