Volume 9 - Rebecca and the Haunted House of Hitchcock

We're heading into our third month here, and I'm starting to feel confident I won't just up and abandon all five of you that are reading this. Confidence is addictive, and I'm thinking the next step in our young friendship can be only one thing - a themed month of posts.

What kind of theme are we talking about? Well, I'm glad you asked. There's one man who casts the biggest shadow over cinema history in my eyes, and I feel like he's a guy who deserves at least a month's worth of posts about some of his films. That man is Alfred Hitchcock. Thus, September will be henceforth known as.....

Alfred Hitchcock Month! 

I know, it's simple. But it's effective. And the exclamation point gives it a nice kick.

It's something of a challenge to opine on Hitchcock's filmography these days - people have been writing about him for about 90 years, the takes aren't exactly fresh - so I'm going to be taking a few leaps of faith as I put together five double features involving the Master of Suspense. This week's leap might be the biggest, so stay with me here. I promise I'll try to make sense.

With no further ado (except for the ado I'm about to type), let's kick things off with Hitchcock's first American film.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Rebecca

1940, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

As a fan of all things Hitchcock, it's absolutely crazy to know that Rebecca is the only film directed by the man that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And it's especially surprising that the movie is as good as it is (Spoiler alert: I think it's very good) when you consider the relationship between Hitchcock, who was new to America, and the man he was working for - legendary Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. Many accounts of the film's production tell of their squabbles over various aspects of the film, ranging from Hitch's filming techniques to the adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel. People who first met Hitchcock through his later works might watch Rebecca and quickly realize that his signature style is at times muddled by the relationship with his producer, not to mention the strict Hays Code held over films of this era. The relationship between Selznick and Hitchcock did contribute to a couple of films that are relatively clunky compared to the director's other works, but thankfully Rebecca is not one of them.

For those unfamiliar, Rebecca is not the story of a woman named Rebecca. In fact, the woman at the center of the film - an innocent youngster (Joan Fontaine) who becomes the bride of the sophisticated Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) - has no name. Never once does a character in the film refer to her by name (kind of like Roddy Piper in They Live, but we'll save that for another double feature). They do, however, spend plenty of time talking about Rebecca, Maxim's deceased first wife. Those familiar with Hitchcock's standoffish attitude toward actresses might assume this rudeness toward the living lead character was his doing, but in fact the nameless lead character comes right out of Du Maurier's novel.

The second Mrs. De Winter, as she is often referred to, meets Maxim in the South of France, just as he appears to be contemplating suicide on the edge of a cliff. Instead of taking this as a sign that he's a bit tortured, she ends up in a whirlwind romance with him. She thinks he's marvelous, he thinks she's a cute child. When she nearly has to leave, he proposes with a super romantic "I'm asking you to marry me me, you little fool!" If it seems like their relationship is a little possessive, that's a shared byproduct of both the source novel and on set tensions. Olivier was upset that his then girlfriend, Vivien Leigh, didn't get the part over Fontaine, so he took his frustrations out on her. Hitchcock, who always thought anything he could use to build tension was worth a try, decided the best approach to this would be to tell Fontaine that everyone else on set hated her too. 

It seems ridiculous that this is how a major Hollywood picture - Selznick saw Rebecca as his first attempt to top the success he had in 1939 with Gone With The Wind - would function, but I guess that's how you put the "drama" in melodrama. Rebecca needed Olivier to be a bit angry as the widower who hasn't shaken off his past, and it needed Fontaine to be timid and frightened by her sudden ascent from paid traveling companion to wife living in a grand estate. Maybe the producer and director didn't go about getting that out of the actors in the right way, but they definitely got it out of them.

No disrespect to the leads - or Judith Anderson, who we'll get to in a minute - but the real star of Rebecca is Manderley, the estate that is Maxim and his new bride's home. The house itself was a miniature (Selznick couldn't find a location that suited his tastes), but it looms large over the entire movie. The opening narration by Fontaine is still one of the most haunting introductions ever put on film, setting the mood for the picture and foreshadowing things to come.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter...for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers...and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me."

If you haven't guessed by now, Manderley is haunted. It's not haunted in the traditional horror movie way, but it is haunted by memories of Rebecca. Everything Maxim's new bride tries to do in the house is met by not-so-subtle reminders that Rebecca did things differently or that Rebecca was "the most beautiful creature I ever saw" or that everyone in the house "simply adored Rebecca." The girl is already facing a big change in her life, and now everyone that meets her is comparing her to this ghost that's just hanging out in a giant bedroom in the off limits wing of the house.

The living face of the house's intimidation toward her is that of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who happened to be Rebecca's closest confidant. Mrs. Danvers is played perfectly by Judith Anderson (I don't know who won the Oscar for Supporting Actress that year, but the voters must have got it wrong) and Hitchcock frames her as a constant reminder to the new bride that she is living in Rebecca's house. Hitchcock used Danvers the same way William Castle would later use characters in films like House on Haunted Hill, making her an unblinking character who seems to float from place to place. There are plenty of implications about Mrs. Danvers' relationship with the past Mrs. De Winter - implications that the Hays Code wouldn't let Hitchcock address - but her intentions toward the new bride are pretty obvious. She wants her gone from Manderley.

The second half of the film focuses on the deteriorating relationship between the still grieving Maxim and his new wife, who can't understand who or what she is supposed to be in this house. It's unfortunate that the film gets stuck in some mundane courtroom drama as it winds to a conclusion, but the house looms large over the finale. When we learn Rebecca's secret, we're reminded one last time that Manderley belonged to her, and that it always will.

Paranormal spirits may not be at work in this house, but the film's finale sends a message that echoes a passage from Fontaine's opening narration, confirming once and for all that this house is no longer a home.

"I looked upon a desolate shell...with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again. That much is certain."

Picking a double feature to go with Rebecca is a tall challenge. It's a 130 minute melodrama that can stand alone pretty well. But when I looked at the things I love about Rebecca, I started to think about how Hitchcock could have expanded on some of them in a different setting at a different time. So this week's double feature is less about what this film does, and more about what I'd loved to have seen the director do to build off of it later in his career. Here are some of the factors that played into this double feature pick.

• Hitch is known as a master of suspense, but very few of his films fit into the traditional definition of the horror genre. The ones that do - most notably Psycho and The Birds - are widely regarded as being among the best the genre has to offer. Sometimes I get a little greedy considering what it would have been like if the director dove into the genre a little more often.
• Hitchcock gained a lot of control over his films after his contract with Selznick ended in 1947, and also became more of a risk taker as he moved through the final couple of decades of his career. It's easy to wonder what a man of Hitchcock's mindset could have done with more time working after the Hays Code ended (it was replaced by the MPAA rating system in 1968 after being ignored for most of the 1960s) and filmmakers were given more freedom to tell riskier stories on screen.
• I mentioned similarities between Hitchcock and William Castle, possibly the two most larger than life showmen in genre cinema history. Hitchcock managed to make us feel the tension of a haunting inside Manderley, so I wonder what he could have done with a more traditional haunted house story.There would probably be some similarities with Castle's work, but I also think Hitchcock would have been willing to make a haunted house film that's a little darker and more adult-themed.
• Random tangent: Within Hitchcock's own filmography, the next closest thing to a haunted house film is obviously Psycho. Though very little of the film actually happens in the iconic house on the hill above the Bates Motel, it's still the place that Norman Bates' demons - most notably, Mother - call home. There's another way of telling that story that sure could have felt like a cross between Rebecca and a William Castle chiller, but most people would probably agree with me when I say the way Hitchcock handled Psycho worked out pretty darn well.

Now let's jump ahead 33 years, and take a look at how much different the world Hitchcock was making films in had become.

The Legend of Hell House

1973, Directed by John Hough

In 1972, Hitchcock released his next to last film, Frenzy. It was the first R rated film of his career, and it had enough on screen violence that Roger Ebert called it "Psycho without the shower curtain." For the time - and especially for the director, who was usually more playful with his murders - it was a brutal film about a rapist and killer on the loose in London. Films like Psycho and Marnie - a late career film in which Hitchcock featured an implied rape - had given us a taste for what Hitchcock could be willing to do after the pesky Hays Code was dead. But Frenzy was the first time he put the violence and deviance he'd always hinted at front and center in one of his films.

Which leads me to the film I think a Hitchcock haunted house film of the 1970s would have looked like - The Legend of Hell House. Released a year after Frenzy, it's a perverse and violent adaptation of Richard Matheson's Hell House that drew a PG rating despite a whole bunch of violence toward women and talk about orgies and a candy coating of pure dread that makes every minute of the picture a little bit more sinister than the last. Like Rebecca, many of the sexual elements of the novel had to be toned down for this film, yet the final product still manages to top off its horror setting with a tone that's pretty kinky for 1973.

The connections between Rebecca and The Legend of Hell House as full films are pretty superficial, but there's something to be said for the Hell House of the title as a more vile version of Manderley. As four characters spend several days in the deserted house, we quickly realize there's a gender swap at the center of the house's power. The late Rebecca is replaced here by the unseen Emeric Belasco, a twisted millionaire who towered over the mansion and hosted depraved parties before disappearing after a massacre that took place in his house.

It might be unfair to draw a parallel between a fictional sadist and a real world director who was notorious for being cruel to actors and actresses, but I get the feeling Hitchcock would have had a lot of fun with a character like Belasco haunting one of his films. Much like Hitchcock, director John Hough (working from a screenplay adapted by Matheson himself) spends much of the film putting the female leads that walk into Hell House in stressful and vicious situations.

The first of these women is Florence Tanner, a spiritual medium played by Pamela Franklin. She's interested in the specific entities that are in the house, and ends up focusing her attention on what she believes is the ghost of Belasco's son, Daniel. She's a rather direct young woman, especially considering the situation she's walked into, and some of her optimistic and matter-of-fact reactions to things in the house remind us of some of the more innocent women in Hitchcock's canon, like Barbara Bel Geddes' Midge from Vertigo or his daughter Patricia's Barbara Morton in Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock often had mercy on characters like her, but at this point in his career he was breaking a lot of the rules he had once established.

The other female character featured in The Legend of Hell House is Ann Barrett, played by Gayle Hunnicutt, and she's the character Hitchcock really would have had fun with. She finds herself in the house simply because she's the devoted wife of the man in charge of the investigation, and the house quickly latches on to her. The only reasons for this that the film allows us to assume are a) she's a woman and b) she's sexually frustrated.

One of the film's most intense moments occurs when Ann, possessed by the primal spirits of the house, throws herself at the male character in the film who's not her husband. She grinds her teeth and sweats all over the screen and growls about how much fun it would be if the people in the house all - for lack of a better term - got freaky. And she's very convincing about it. Mrs. Danvers' character came with an implied sexual relation to Rebecca, but the portrayal of the possessed Ann here feels like a moment where all the rules that held Hitchcock back in 1940 have been thrown out the window and replaced by a moment of untethered lust.

The closest thing we have to the second Mrs. DeWinter here is physical medium Ben Fischer, played by the great Roddy McDowall. While the house physically torments the women that enter it, Fischer is the character whose sanity is most blatantly attacked by the house. Fischer is the sole survivor of a previous investigation at Hell House, and his psychic connection to it makes him an easy target. Ben and Florence are clearly more dangerous to Belasco and Hell House than the leader of the expedition, who just wants to wipe the house clean with a giant ghost vacuum machine (I'm pretty sure that's not the technical term, but it's what I'm going with), and Fischer's restrained approach while facing the house makes him the character in the film who needs to step up if he's going to make it out of Hell House alive.

It's hard to see Hitchcock spending as much time on the spiritual and scientific aspects of The Legend of Hell House as this film does; both of these themes were often bumped out of his work in the name of adventure and escapism. But The Legend of Hell House has such a playful psychology toward its characters that I really wish I could see what Hitchcock would have done with them near the end of his career. He might have made a more playful version of the film - perhaps sacrificing some of the dread for a more direct threat - but I think he would have enjoyed the similarities between this film's ending and the endings of Rebecca and Psycho, each of which feature a surprising revelation about the unseen force that haunts the film.

Like I said at the beginning - I'm taking a big leap of faith about my favorite director's approach to filmmaking with this double feature. But it makes sense that a man who once said "I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks" would've jumped at the opportunity to make a haunted house film that was more aggressive than a Selznick produced melodrama ever could be. Rebecca shows us how Hitchcock was able to make a novel about a second wife feel like a kind of haunted house story, and The Legend of Hell House makes me dream about what a purely Hitchcockian haunted house story could be. It might not be the double feature anyone expected, but if it's a choice that shocks you then I'm glad I could provide one too.