Despite producer David O. Selznick's interference, Hitchcock's film is a triumph of sustained mystery.
A timid orphan, a paid companion to an overbearing American, is befriended in Monte Carlo by the suave widower Maxim de Winter who proposes to her; although he is occasionally remote, she accepts.
At his mansion Manderley, she finds everywhere the oppressive presence of Maxim's first wife Rebecca who drowned a year before. Her nemesis is the disdainful, obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers who keeps Rebecca's bedroom as a shrine to her beloved mistress.
Vivien Leigh lobbied for the lead role but was considered too forceful a presence, leaving Joan Fontaine to triumph in it.
Shelf or charity shop? An absolute keeper, for Hitchcock's masterly storytelling as well as Franz Waxman's swooning score, and the performances of Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, the wonderful Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, sexy George Sanders as Rebecca's cousin and lover, and delightful support from Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce and Florence Bates.
