Rebecca is a 1940 American romantic psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was Hitchcock’s first American project, and his first film under contract with producer David O. Selznick. The film stars Laurence Olivier as the brooding, aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the young woman who becomes his second wife. It received eleven nominations at the 13th Academy Awards, more than any other film that year. It won two awards; Best Picture, and Best Cinematography.
About Rebecca (1940 film) in brief
Rebecca is a 1940 American romantic psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was Hitchcock’s first American project, and his first film under contract with producer David O. Selznick. The screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, and adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, were based on the 1938 novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. The film stars Laurence Olivier as the brooding, aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the young woman who becomes his second wife. It received eleven nominations at the 13th Academy Awards, more than any other film that year. It won two awards; Best Picture, and Best Cinematography. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ The film is a gothic tale shot in black-and-white. Maxim’s first wife Rebecca, who died before the events of the film, is never seen.
Her reputation and recollections of her are a constant presence in the lives of Maxim, his new wife and the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. All except the deranged Mrs. Danvers, who dies when the ceiling collapses on her, escapes when the film’s final scene takes place near the end. In the film Maxim shoots Rebecca, while he thinks of killing her as she taunted him into believing she was pregnant with another man’s child. At least one plot detail was altered to comply with the Hollywood Production Code, which said that the murder of a spouse had to be punished to be punishable by death. The movie was theatrically released on April 12, 1940 to critical and commercial success. It is the only filmdirected by Hitchcock to win the former award, becoming the only movie directed by him to win both the best picture and best cinematography awards.
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