DVD/150: REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Hitchcock ended his British career with the misjudged JAMAICA INN based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier and his Hollywood career began with another, REBECCA, and it remains one of his greatest - his only film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

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.

Dvd/150: JAMAICA INN (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

Wanting to leave England to launch his Hollywood career with an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, Hitchcock first had to make what would be his last British film for 33 years and he disliked it.

Irish orphan Mary Yellen (Maureen O'Hara's first major role) arrives at Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt but discovers her uncle is the leader of a ship-wrecking crew of murderous plunderers.

However the film is thrown off-kilter by the unabashed hamming of co-producer Charles Laughton as the local squire Sir Humphrey Pengallon.  Du Maurier was unhappy her plot was changed to accommodate his over-written role and Hitchcock was unhappy that for the first time he was faced with a star who could overrule his ideas.

The characterful supporting cast mostly follow Laughton's lead but Robert Newton is uncharacteristically muted to the point of invisibility.  He also resembles Harpo Marx!

Shelf or charity shop? For what it is... shelf