#85
Post
by colinr0380 » Sun Jul 08, 2018 5:47 am
Watching Rebecca with the isolated music and score track (which highlights how well it plays as a silent film! Especially the amusing alternation between swelling chords for the burgeoning romance and comic-wacky foolish underscore for Mrs Van Hopper's scenes, which subliminally helps to undermine her pomposity! That gets replaced by the romance alternating with brooding darkness once Max's brooding thoughts and Mrs Danvers' antagonist comes up as the new threats), I also found myself focusing on other aspects of the film, such as the way that the servant Frith contrasts with Mrs Danvers nicely in the early scenes. Both are doing what 'the first Mrs de Winter' did in her absence but Mrs Danvers, despite a veneer of deference to the new lady of the house, wants things to stay the same whilst Frith is more than happy to have a new, living Mrs de Winter to set the agenda again, and will change to accommodate that. Perhaps the in between figure of those two is the dog, who is able to be totally standoffish at first without having to keep that veneer of respect up, but who eventually comes to love his new mistress.
Also strangely I think Rebecca and Psycho have a few things in common. They both have a man tormented by the ghostly presence of the previous woman in his life which is causing him trouble in his latest relationship! Who he may or may not have murdered! (Only made stronger when Psycho reveals its previous woman to be just as much of a figment of the imagination as Rebecca is at this point!) There is a bit of a twist in that the 'gothic old mansion' of Manderley is the facade of normality and proper behaviour in Rebecca, with the fisherman's hut furnished into a modern styled adulterous boudoir being the heart of corruption; whilst of course in Psycho the blandly functional modern motel is the surface whilst the old dark mansion on the hill is where all of the old secrets of the past are contained. (Though both of the places containing dark secrets are bedrooms in some fashion!)
I suppose that we could even see Max's sister and brother-in-law coming to view his new wife as similar to the Vera Miles and John Gavin characters, in being too modern and forward in attitude and behaviour for their surroundings, though that might be pushing it! I also suppose that the George Sanders character in Rebecca is the true gauche force of modernity and crude modern attitudes to the world, which makes an interesting contrast to "I" feeling gauche and uncultured in polite society at first eventually being much more suited to being the lady of the house than even Rebecca really was! (Whilst Rebecca and Mrs Danvers in some ways come to be trapped inside Manderley as ghosts at the end, I do not get the sense that "I" will really need a Manderley to affirm her status, as long as she and Maxim are in love and have each other) "I" grows up, but perhaps not in the way Maxim feared of becoming a 'modern, sexual, adulterous' woman, instead in terms of becoming more self-assured about her right to exist in her world even against the vocal protests of others at her unsuitability!
Though of course Psycho is just as much carrying forward themes from Vertigo: the re-creation of a woman in Vertigo becomes the man actually becoming the female figure he is obsessed with himself, cutting out the middle woman! Though maybe the inquest sequence in Rebecca bears comparison to that of Vertigo, with the triggering of blackmail through to neat resolution in Rebecca becoming in Vertigo the climax of a murder plot carried out which leaves Scottie in a completely resolution-less state of anxiety, rather like the suicidal state that Maxim is in at the opening of Rebecca and something which is perhaps a more cruel and callous act than the murder of the wife! Rebecca's authorities comfort after a period of instability; Vertigo's authority figures are clueless rubber stampers imperfectly trying to neatly tie up events they have failed to understand (as perhaps is Psycho's psychiatrist at the end of that film)