The Guardian (28/Jun/2006) - Rebecca: Mad about the girl

(c) The Guardian (28/Jun/2006)

Mad about the girl

Paedophilia, incest, unrelieved wimpishness - Hitchcock's Rebecca has it all, says Germaine Greer, as the film is re-released

Women's erotic fantasy is so subversive, so deeply shocking that it can only be written in code. The archetypal themes that bask under the mask of incident, dialogue and location in women's romantic literature are the seduction of the father by the daughter, and the destruction of the mother. Most romantic literature stops short after the seduction of the father by the little girl, leaving the mother to be annihilated by inference alone.

Whether it's Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Bridget Jones's Diary or any old Mills and Boon novel, the grist that feeds the fantasy mill is the same.

Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca may be a superior example of deeply encoded female pornography but, nearly 70 years after it was written, the code seems to have worn so thin that the unsuspecting reader is slightly revolted. In Rebecca, Maxim de Winter is the Daddy (obviously), the mother has three faces, being the appalling Mrs Van Hopper, the ever-present Mrs Danvers and, of course, the absent Rebecca. The nameless narrator is the seducing child. If, as her sister-in-law says, she is an "absolute child", it follows that Rebecca is the classic novel of paedophilia.

So infantile is the second Mrs De Winter that we can hardly stand her in prose or on celluloid. It is not just that she is clumsy, inarticulate and has lank hair (in the novel, though not the movie); it is that she does as she is told. Her meekness might get her to inherit the earth of Manderley, but to a 21st-century sensibility it is simply disgusting. To fit the template, Maxim has to be masterful, but even in a Mills and Boon novel the heroine puts up more of a fight.

The disturbing truth is that the second Mrs De Winter seduces Maxim simply because she is so young. She has nothing else going for her. Maxim wants to marry her - not despite the fact that she is, in his phrase, a "little fool", but because of it. When she snivels, which is often, he provides the handkerchief. He orders her about unmercifully. When she knocks over a glass of port and fusses to clean it up, he orders her to leave it, as if she were a dog sniffing excrement. Every now and then, he kisses her on the top of the head, just as she does Jasper the dog. By way of endearment, he calls her "you sweet child" or "my good child".

The unseen Rebecca was a full-grown woman, with long legs and broad shoulders, who could sail a boat, ride a horse, throw a party and furnish a room. The infant interloper is incapable of any kind of adult activity but spends whole days creeping round the house and hiding behind doors, eavesdropping on adult conversations.

All this, you may say, must be deliberate. Du Maurier must have known what monsters lurked beneath her impressionistic narrative. There are odd signs that the narrative is not under conscious control, such as the nameless narrator's disquisition on her family with its "lovely and unusual" name, and her dead father's misunderstood artistic temperament. Du Maurier had already written a biography of her father, the actor-manager Sir Gerald Du Maurier but, as often happens with gifted daughters, at the age of 31, she still had not got her father out of her system. His irruption is, however, momentary; Maxim remains undisturbed as the silver-back, the dominant male. Still, at one of the murkier levels, Maxim De Winter equals Gerald Du Maurier.

When Alfred Hitchcock takes over Du Maurier's narrative to make a movie, we can expect that what is suggested in the novel will be made blatant. By casting Joan Fontaine, he made sure that the second Mrs De Winter was a breastless, almost pre-adolescent figure; in shot after shot, she is made to appear tiny and super-fragile next to the brooding hulk of De Winter, played by Laurence Olivier as if he were Heathcliff. In two shots, her head is always below or under his. She often wears a version of school uniform: shapeless skirt and shirt, and sensible shoes. Under stress, she twists her hands in front of her empty shirt like a schoolgirl, and when she is happy (briefly) she skips. The only time we suspect she has breasts is when she chooses the wrong costume for the fancy dress ball, which, of course, incurs the wrath of her father-husband because it makes her look like an adult woman. He wants her to come as Alice in Wonderland: "You look like it now, with your finger in your mouth." Olivier was not happy with the choice of Fontaine for the part, and apparently did his best to increase her nervousness, which just shows how little he understood what he was supposed to be doing: she is convincing, in unsubtle movie terms, as he is not. She takes direction; he does not.

In giving us a first sight of de Winter standing over a precipice, looking as if he might commit suicide and allowing the nameless narrator to intervene, Hitchcock allows the phallic immovability of the father figure to be contradicted. With Olivier playing the part in a rather showy fashion, the balance never does come quite right, but Fontaine's wimpishness is so unrelieved that eventually the dynamic rights itself. By the end of the film, Du Maurier's denouement has been achieved; Mrs Danvers has gone up in flames and the child-bride has finally assumed her mother's place as the sexual partner of her father.

Producer David O Selznick was determined that the film should be true to the novel - that is, to the plot of the novel - but he lost out when it came to allowing Maxim to get away with murder and had to turn Rebecca's death into an accident. When it came to the subtext, he was quick to see that it could not be tampered with - but not smart enough to see that Olivier could never play a proper toff, that he was too actorish by half, and that close-ups of his mannerisms would undo all credibility. Selznick edited the film himself, and did his best to modify Olivier's performance. Americans tend to think he succeeded.

The other misunderstanding is Manderley. Hitchcock turns it into the kind of garbled Gothic horror that might have been thrown up by a Californian magnate. There is no sense of the Cornish coast of the western reaches of the English Channel. As they are part of the masking detail across the archetypal structure, we do not miss them.

Compared with the movie imagery of today, Hitchcock's Rebecca is low definition. This week's re-release will only make sense if screenings can convey some notion of the context of the piece. If the image is too big and too close to the viewers, if the sound is wrap-around, the impact of its obsessive camerawork will be lost. Only by entering into its narrow compass can its impact be felt. If it is, we might even hear a suggestion from the paedophile hysteria wing that it should be banned.

Rebecca goes on limited re-release on Friday. See bfi.org.uk/rebecca for details.

Devil in a black dress

Anna Massey on playing the 'evil' Mrs Danvers

I played Mrs Danvers in 1979, in a four-part TV adaptation by Hugh Whitemore (which, incidentally, starred Jeremy Brett, my first husband, as Max de Winter). I was too young for the part. Mrs Danvers was meant to be in her late 60s but I was nowhere near. In the book, she is described as having grey hair tied up in a bun, and wearing a Victorian dress with a long train. I saw no reason to play it like that - I didn't see why, age-wise, she couldn't have been a contemporary of Rebecca's.

Rebecca is an extremely romantic and rather sexual novel. I think Mrs Danvers is one of the sexual participants - maybe not consciously, but she's certainly a sexual thread through it. We know that Rebecca didn't love Max, but we don't really know what Max's feelings were for Rebecca - apart from the fact that he was obsessed by her beauty. We do know his feelings were totally tarnished by the end of their marriage. Whether Mrs Danvers was a latent lesbian, I have no idea. But she was certainly in love, totally and utterly obsessed with Rebecca. The book is littered with sexual symbols - the hairbrush and the nightie laid out carefully on the bed. So I played her rather like a lesbian in a French film, in a slinky black silk dress.

Essentially, I played what I imagined Du Maurier had subconsciously written, though it also seemed an interesting new angle on the part. Of course, I would not want to detract from Judith Anderson's startlingly scary and brilliant performance as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca. I didn't see this version when it came out in 1940, as I was three years old, but I must have seen it when I was 9 or 10 and I remember being very scared by her. Mrs Danvers is a very scary part, whether you play her in a Victorian dress or in a slinky silk dress. What she wears is only an outward carapace: underneath she's one of the really evil female characters in literature. You never forget that malevolent smile.

Anna Massey was talking to Aida Edemariam