Alfred Hitchcock's classic film captured the psychosexual hysteria
of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic novel. By contrast, the pallid
new Masterpiece Theatre version has been through way too much therapy.
+ + + + "Rebecca"
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before there was "The Kiss," there was Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," a Freudian Gothic romance about an orphan of no consequence who marries a mysterious wealthy widower old enough to be her father. Published in 1938, "Rebecca" is considered the first Gothic romance of the 20th century. Like its ancestors "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre," "Rebecca" is a strange and wonderful example of what used to be patronizingly called "the women's novel." And like those earlier masterpieces, "Rebecca" remains so popular that it's always being adapted for the movies or TV. But, today, the unabashedly melodramatic old Hollywood versions of "Wuthering Heights" and "Rebecca" made by book-loving producer David O. Selznick in 1939 and 1940 are often regarded with the same kind of dismissive snobbishness the novels received from literary critics 50 years ago. Come on, where's the sadomasochism? Show me the incest! So we now have such corrective measures as Peter Kosminsky's awful 1992 remake of "Wuthering Heights," which replaces black-and-white bliss with black-and-blue realism -- as if we really want to see a greasy-haired Ralph Fiennes interpreting Heathcliff as an abusive pig, cuffing Juliette Binoche around the manor. And the pallid new "Masterpiece Theatre" version of "Rebecca," which is an overt Oedipal triangle completely drained of the eroticism of imagination. Thanks, thanks a lot. The three-and-a-half hour "Rebecca" (which has already aired in the U.K.) is the fourth filming of the novel but, really, Hitchcock's cork-popper is still the one that counts. ("Rebecca" was Hitchcock's first American movie and the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for best picture.) Late in his life, Hitchcock told an interviewer he'd thought du Maurier's novel was "humorless," and maybe he was right. But he and screenwriters Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison found darkly humorous ways to convey the novel's tone of quietly mounting hysteria and its ultra-refined schoolgirl-passion prose. "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," goes du Maurier's famous first line, and listening to the film's star, Joan Fontaine, gush the line in her affected, plummy tones, you're tempted to add "in my Maidenform bra." Yet Hitchcock and his collaborators never detract from the fascinating psychological dance at the center of the story. Hitchcock lets Laurence Olivier brood and tease to his heart's content as the hero, Maxim de Winter. And he delights in juxtaposing Fontaine's nameless bride (she's a sensibly shod innocent working as a paid lady's companion when she meets Maxim) with little mementos of the dead, ravishing Rebecca de Winter -- the woman monogrammed everything. As Rebecca's living torch bearer, the butch, devoted maid Mrs. Danvers, Judith Anderson (in a classic, over-the-top performance) is done up like a silent-movie ghoul with white skin, hair worn in braided snakes atop her head and a strange black floor length get-up that completely obscures her legs and feet. She's always turning up silently behind the second Mrs. de Winter, offering her a whiff of her dead mistress's still-fragrant undergarments. Hitchcock's depiction of Danvers' and Rebecca's possible lesbian attachment is not a flattering one -- Danvers is quite mad and the polysexual and cruel Rebecca is revealed to have been both barren and rotten with cancer -- but then this was all lifted straight from du Maurier. As was Maxim's unforgettably casual proposal to the second Mrs. de Winter: "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool!" Watching Hitchcock's "Rebecca" (and reading the book) now, it's easy to laugh at the ridiculously dated and unenlightened bits. But you really wouldn't want "Rebecca" any other way. There's something eminently swoonworthy about Olivier at his most beautiful and tormented (let's not forget, he played Heathcliff the year before), taking his naive child bride firmly in hand. And that's why "Rebecca," dated as it may be, endures -- it makes deep contact with the buried junk in our psyches. Du Maurier scholars believe that the writer based Maxim on her own adored, formidable father, Gerald, who was an actor, theater company manager and ladies' man. "It seems that du Maurier was never totally convinced of her father's all consuming love for her," writes Richard Kelly in his book "Daphne du Maurier," and that's an understatement, if "Rebecca" is any indication. After all, this is a novel in which, at a pivotal moment of courtship, the heroine starts thinking about Daddy ("It was not easy to explain my father ... He was my secret property. Preserved for me alone"). You don't need a Ph.D. to see that Rebecca represents a highly sexualized rival for Maxim's affections -- the Mother figure. Only when the heroine realizes that Maxim never loved Rebecca (and there's a darker secret, but I won't spoil it for those who don't know the story) does she develop a spine, guiding Maxim through a tricky bit of police business that could ruin them. But du Maurier doesn't stop at merely usurping Mommy -- she has to symbolically exorcise her, too, through a spell-breaking fire that destroys Manderley, Maxim's beloved family home, which has been irreparably soiled by Rebecca's poisonous sexuality. The only sensible way to film "Rebecca" is to do what Hitchcock did -- dive into the fairy tale, dreamlike aspects of the book and just row merrily down the stream of subconsciousness. The book is a mystery about self-discovery, and the discovery of others' true natures. To work on-screen, the characters that arouse and terrify the heroine have to be as vividly exciting and intimidating as they seem to her in her semi-hysterical state. Which is why the "Masterpiece Theatre" miniseries never recovers from the disastrous miscasting of Charles Dance as Maxim. Somebody once called Dance "the thinking woman's sex symbol" and he's been in demand on PBS ever since. But while this guy might make you think, he sure doesn't give you any ideas. Dance is bland, hawk-eyed and conveys zero erotic charge. One British reviewer of "Rebecca" complained that Dance was "a dead ringer for the man who stands up at the end of every Agatha Christie and announces, 'A very pretty story Poirot, but the thing is, you see, you've got to find the proof.'" And it isn't just that Dance is thoroughly unappealing, he also looks vastly older than his co-star, the gifted ingenue Emilia Fox. When he cocks his wizened head and says "I'm twice your age," you want to chortle, "Thrice, buddy, if a day!" (Olivier played the role at 32, with gray coloring in his hair to make him look 42.) OK, maybe the intention here was to underscore the heroine's father fixation (du-uh, as if we couldn't figure that out for ourselves), and maybe it would have worked with an older actor with sexual presence, like Alan Rickman (now that would have been a Maxim to rival Olivier's). But all of the filmmakers' attempts to light our fuses -- Maxim romps bare-chested in the surf, the heroine's breast sneaks out from under the sheets -- just seem ludicrous, in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of way, as in, Check out the geezer getting it on with that Girl Scout! This "Rebecca" has deep conceptual problems. Director Jim O'Brien shoots the miniseries as if in homage to Hitch; the tumbling sea scenes, the shadows that fall on Mrs. Danvers' face, the placement of the actors in the scene where Rebecca descends a staircase wearing a dress very displeasing to Maxim -- they're all shot-for-shot recreations of the original. Which makes you wonder why they've gone to the trouble of remaking it at all. (Unlike Hitchcock's film, however, the miniseries is rendered in living Laura Ashley English garden color.) More puzzling, Arthur Hopcraft's script preserves some dialogue and scenes from the novel intact, but invents and embellishes a lot more in the service of hot, gritty postmodernism. Mrs. Danvers (played by Diana Rigg!) is now a raging dyke, which may be marginally more politically correct than Judith Anderson's repressed interpretation (the character is an insult to lesbians no matter how you slice it), but it takes the campy "Celluloid Closet" fun out of things. "I was the only one she really loved!" Rigg's Danvers cries in a climactic scene, which is quite different from the book's: "She was not in love with anyone. She despised all men. She was above all that." As Mrs. Van Hopper, the heroine's vulgar American traveling companion, Faye Dunaway boozes, floozes and leers like a refugee from an Aaron Spelling soap. And, oh yeah -- we actually see Rebecca in flashback. But the most egregious change Hopcraft makes is the ending, which he bases on an epilogue that du Maurier ultimately trashed (she published her annotated first outline of "Rebecca" in 1980 in "The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories"). In the miniseries' ending, the fire at Manderley doesn't just symbolically divest Maxim of his past and his power, it leaves him a physical cripple. "There will never be children," the heroine tells us in the miniseries. Du Maurier must have realized that not only was this ending a bummer, it implied castration, which was all wrong for the story she'd just written. But it's absolutely right for this passionless, over-thought and oddly moralistic interpretation to end with the heroine and her man punished for their impure thoughts and deeds. It just proves that when it comes to Gothic novels, some guys still don't get it. Fairy tales are not meant to be held up to the cold light of reality. The magic works best in the dark.
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PHOTO BY SOPHIE BAKER, CARLTON UK