Alfred Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940)

This is a movie discussion group. While participants usually arrive having watched the film beforehand, you are invited to come and listen if you haven't seen the film yet.

“A naïve and self-conscious woman struggles to adjust to her new role as a widowed aristocrat's wife, but seems preyed upon by his first wife's spectral, malignant presence.”

REBECCA (1940)
Directed by ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Screenplay by Joan Harrison and Robert E. Sherwood
Based on the 1938 novel by DAPHNE DU MAURIER
With LAURENCE OLIVIER, JOAN FONTAINE, GEORGE SANDERS, NIGEL BRUCE, LEO G. CARROLL and JUDITH ANDERSON
2 hours 10 mins.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JYsagCCYtKXyKXsyJWXFYXlSLSPcszgD/view?usp=sharing

It’s obvious by now that Hitchcock is the mainstream director most obsessed with queer characters and themes (this is QUEER FEAR!’s fourth one!), but this being his entry into the studio system, produced by the ostentatious David Selznick one year after "Gone With the Wind”—and not incidentally Hitch’s only Best Picture Oscar winner—makes the blatant thematization of lesbian desire that much more perverse. In particular, the character of Mrs. Danvers, the now-dead title character’s maidservant, was, according to one critic, “embodying closeted lesbian realness even before [actress] Judith Anderson catapulted her into the high camp stratosphere.” The scoffers, including the flaming Robert Osborne, host of TCM for 20 years and supposed Hollywood expert, must be paralyzed with anxiety (or homophobia), because they refuse to do any research. If they did, they’d know that Joseph Breen and his Production Code Administration was so freaked out about the character that he threatened to halt the release of the film if they didn’t remove "Mrs. Danvers’ description of Rebecca’s physical attributes, her handling of the various garments, particularly the night gown,” because “if any possible hint of” a perverted relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca “creeps into this scene, we will of course not be able to approve the picture.” Hitch and Selznick somehow managed to keep the scene in. The character survives the novel, but the film won’t allow that. Is that the un-queering that must happen in the last five minutes of every mainstream film, or does Hitchcock’s Catholic guilt always get the better of him?