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Other characters may be thoughtless, like Maxim’s sister (Gladys Cooper) and brother-in-law (Nigel Bruce), rude like Mrs. Danvers, the head of the servants, is thoroughly obsessed with her former mistress (the scene in which she shows Rebecca’s underwear drawer to our young heroine bristles with suppressed desire) and absolutely ruthless in her efforts to eliminate the usurper and maintain Rebecca’s ghostly hold over Manderley. Maxim, by contrast, is a grown man who wants a child for a wife because he tried living with a grown-up woman once and failed miserably.

With the wisdom accumulated through several decades of barking my own shins on the rough corners of the world, however, I’ve come to realize that Fontaine’s character is the sanest person in the film. She seemed to me the worst stereotype of a passive woman who is willing to absorb practically any abuse anyone choses to deliver to her, because she doesn’t think she deserves anything better, and whose helpless suffering is positively painful to watch. Rebecca many years ago, I couldn’t get over my dislike of the female lead.

While most of us would prefer to live in the daylight world, we’re also fascinated by the world of shadows, and it takes a masterful director like Hitchcock to take us there and back. Our heroine must learn to navigate this nether world, and she makes some nearly fatal blunders in the beginning, but like any true hero on a journey she persists and returns to the normal world a changed but better person, having shed her childhood innocence and assumed the mantle of a mature woman who can face life. This world is haunted by a phantom named Rebecca who is never seen but whose name is constantly on everyone’s lips and whose presence is felt everywhere. Rebecca can also be viewed as a psychological fable about an innocent young woman spirited away from the ordinary, daylight world into a dark universe of shadows, where evil lurks at every turn and the smiling faces often hide wicked intentions. Danvers (Judith Anderson) who tries to drive the happy couple apart, but thanks to the young woman’s purity and goodness of heart, both she and Maxim survive while the wicked stepmother goes down, literally, in flames. The castle is haunted by a wicked stepmother named Mrs. At one level, Rebecca is a modern gothic romance about an orphaned young woman (a nameless character played by Joan Fontaine) rescued from her dreary existence as a paid companion to the wealthy Edythe Van Hopper (played with great gusto and wit by Florence Bates) and swept off to a beautiful castle called Manderley by a handsome young prince named Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Selznick, the plot of the film sticks pretty close to the novel’s. Rebecca is based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier and, thanks to the insistence of producer David O. Rebecca may also be Hitchcock’s most twisted film, and that’s saying something for a man who also directed Vertigo, Marnie, and Frenzy. Rebecca, a 1940 release combining British elegance with the kind of production values American money can buy. I’m not sure which of Alfred Hitchcock’s films is his best, but I have no problem choosing which is the most beautiful.