Rebecca’s Problem

Rebecca (1940) and its production has been perpetually studied for its novel approach to and enduring influence on adaptation and censorship regarding Hitchcock’s oeuvre as well as American cinema writ large, as his burgeoning relationships with David O. Selznick and Joseph I. Breen would also soon become tour de forces of cinematic history. Much historiography exists on the nature (content and context) of their productive conflicts- especially their results on the final product and the public reception of these results- but not necessarily how these conflicts reflected the psychological adaptation and censorship about which du Maurier and Hitchcock wrote. Using confluent (cinematic and psychological) definitions of adaptation and censorship (repression), this essay explores how these titans of industry adapted to wartime Hollywood and how their disparate calculations of the industry and America not only affected the adaptation of Rebecca but also reflected the du Maurierienne conflict of repression. The cinematic adaptations of Mr. de Winter and Mrs. Danvers thus not only represent the hypertextual imperative of the (Catholic) MPPDA censorship on apparent (i.e. British) vulgarity but also the paratextual imperative of high fidelity on behalf of Hitchcock’s new partner. I will examine the sociohistorical context for each actor in this triangle of constructive--productive conflict before assembling them to examine what the two “Hitchcockian additions” uncensor/adapt.

Selznick

Before he adapted Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock had already received and refused the first offer (of anyone) to buy Rebecca. When Selznick later bought the rights, Hitchcock was working on U.K. films partially financed by U.S. companies like Paramount, Fox, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; the latter was partially financing The Lady Vanishes when Selznick first cabled Hitchcock. This doubly looming presence (hegemony) of American distribution and production in the U.K. is important industrial context for the adaptation and censorship of Rebecca:  

Gaumont will scrap its U. S. distributing organization… In return M-G-M and Twentieth Century-Fox will market Gaumont pictures not only in the U. S. but in nearly all countries of the world except Britain. There Gaumont will absorb MGM's and Fox's sales forces, effecting sizable economies for the U. S. companies… (TIME, 1936)

MGM and Fox’s distribution of The Lady Vanishes (the first film under the studios’ new contracts and Hitchcock’s biggest film to date) certainly influenced Selznick offering Hitchcock the best contract in Hollywood. 

Hitchcock recalls meeting and signing a contract with Selznick in “August 1937” likely after Kay Barrett inquired (at Selznick’s behest) about the director and “whether he is dealing with MGM…” while Patrick McGilligan claims, conversely, that in the “summer of 1938” Selznick finally made Hitchcock his paltry $50,000 offer. He then later implies that Selznick’s contractual amendments- after the New York Film Critics declared Hitchcock “Director of the Year”- were purely of a reactionary measure and not his own volition. On “January 9, 1938” though, Selznick sent Hitchcock a memo: “Saw “Lady Vanishes” last night and I love you.” Whether Selznick’s better courtship due to his reception or critical reception of Hitchcock’s film is the least important question raised though. In his January memo, after praising Hitchcock, Selznick tersely explains Ronald Colman’s inability to play Mr. de Winter in a less colorful and Breenian way than McGilligan does: “He worried aloud about playing a wife killer, however sympathetic.” McGilligan’s timeline claims this memo is addressed six months before Selznick first met Hitchcock in person- mentioning Rebecca as a potential follow-up to Titanic- and a whole year before Hitchcock visited the Colmans’ home to convince the actor to change his mind (May 1939). When Hitchcock did not take the hint, Colman apparently gave a final answer by signing onto projects that would keep him busy for a year. While McGilligan again provides no primary source, the bold director doing such a thing to someone he was “on pleasant terms with” would certainly not raise any eyebrows. The question raised is still then a matter of time: despite the conflicting timelines, why did the two not address PCA violations sooner than they did? 

A secular British actor’s rejection of Hitchcock after his biggest feature yet- and for the same reason as Breen’s first objection- should have alerted Selznick. Perhaps it did, as his June 1938 memo to John Whitney and Kay Barrett clearly indicates that he had been considering this issue for some time; so why didn’t they prepare a satisfactory treatment for both Colman and Breen before Hitchcock went talent scouting in April 1939? The contract’s stipulation that, “All of the time that Hitchcock devotes to the story between now and the actual starting date is to be gratis,” could have explained this, as Hitchcock was not freed from Jamaica Inn until April, but John Billheimer uses memos from MPPDA archives to demystify the several resubmissions of Rebecca that Breen rejected from mid-July to late September. This timeline aligns with the provocative approache the two take in navigating PCA censorship: they dragged their feet adapting the text because of contempt for censorship. 

Breen

It is important to recall Selznick’s consistent devotion to source material despite industrial imperatives of censorship and adaptation aligning with du Maurier’s textual motifs. Bestowal of the Academy Award for Outstanding Production but not Best Director is clear indication of Selznick’s imprint on the final product being met with positive reception; as Hitchcock jokes, Selznick’s diatribe on faithful adaptation bore fruit. As Selznick mentions, the Gone with the Wind Problem was largely a matter of translating the enormity of the text while maintaining high fidelity. While the production exhausted three directors, the censorship scandal was solved by an MPPDA amendment, agreed upon nearly a year before the film’s release. Rebecca’s Problem, though, was the text itself; Rebecca, the centerpiece of Breen’s objections, cannot exist in Breen’s America. Like the film, she does not physically appear in du Maurier’s text; Breen still found the vestiges of her absent presence too morally overbearing. While industrial imperatives of censorship may have aligned with Hitchcock and du Maurier’s psychoanalytic art by simply being folded it into the (meta)text and its motifs, it apparently did not align with Selznick’s strict view of fidelitous adaptation. Breen and PCA concepts of (cinematic and psychological) adaptation and censorship are very different (and sometimes more dangerous) than all of theirs. 

An assay of Breen’s relation to Rebecca’s adaptation and final product requires analyzing developments in American film censorship in the 1930s and the global political developments driving them. While film critics and journalists like David Denby cite that the creation of the Hays Code in 1934 was William Hays’ culminated response to domestic pressures from primarily religious groups forming their own local censor boards like the National Legion of Decency (NLD) (the conservative Catholic organization formed in 1934 that threatened to call national boycotts for films unaligned with Catholic mores), film historians like Thomas Doherty and Sydney Stern provide richer international context: Hitler’s rise to power and Nazi imperialism. Whether Hays’ courtship (creation of Breen’s PCA) was of his own (American and/or Catholic) volition or not (Nazi imperialism) is unknown and unnecessary to understand Breen’s approach to censorship. As Denby, Doherty, and Stern illustrate, Breen’s volition was certainly antisemitism and Nazism. In 1933, at the same time that Breen wrote to the editor of Jesuit weekly America, “Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the [sic] earth,” Georg Gyssling, Nazi consul since 1927, became ‘Hitler’s Hollywood Consul’ after conveniently restationed in Los Angeles. When Hays appointed Breen the next year, the apparent ideologues had “overlapping briefs,” 

‘Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture… The purpose of the screen, primarily, is to entertain and not to propagandize. To launch such a picture might result in a kind of two-edged sword, with the screen being used for propaganda purposes not so worthy... It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.’ (emphasis added)

Gyssling was allegedly a defector vying to undermine Nazism in the U.S., but Breen was clearly a Nazi-sympathizer if not a Nazi himself. His discretion of necessary repression was inherently different from Selznick and the many other Hollywood moguls who were also first-generation Ashkenazi.

Despite Rebecca having nothing to do with politics or race, adaptating to American censorship from British censorship (industrially and narratively) allowed Hitchcock to dramatize various political exigencies in one plot, leaving what became his uniquely British-American imprint between the American moguls’ manipulations of cultural and industrial imperatives. This final section more explicitly relates what du Maurier’s estate affectionately calls “Hitchcockian additions” to the imperatives of not only cinematic adaptation and censorship as belabored above, but also their psychological referents which make these additions and adaptations “Hitchcockian” in nature.   

Hitchcock: Adapt and Repress

Honeymoon cine film

The inclusion of this scene is especially Hitchcockian in its mosaic relation to the protagonist’s greatest source of suspense and conflict: Fontaine’s desparate adaptation to high society. Like many other Hitchcock films, the reason the female lead clings to her male foil like grim death needs little to no romantic reason; this film provides at least some explanation though: social mobility. What Maxim lacks in romance, she lacks in refinement; the comedy of her unsuitedness for high society (which Mrs. Van Hopper and Danvers repeatedly point out) serves as a distraction from and foil to all his terrifying red flags. Besides, his first red flag in the very first scene- yelling at Fontaine for daring to prevent a potential suicide- is quickly forgiven when Mrs. Van Hopper explains his state of mind. It is exactly this state of mind that comes to haunt Fontaine, though.

Inserted directly at the middle of the film, the cine film scene serves as a dramatization of the couple’s honeymoon phase ending. Fontaine and the audience are too ignorant to understand when Maxim says, “We should have never come back to Manderley,” he means they should not have gotten together at all. He would have returned regardless; to dramatize this, after Crawley tells Fontaine everything about Rebecca, including how she supposedly died (bookended by the most crucial fact, “She was the most beautiful creature I ever saw.”), the new bride orders a fancy new dress for the honeymoon scene. After finally verbalizing her obvious internal conflict, she attacks it and fails miserably. The film flickers out- the honeymoon film pauses- anticipating Frith and the case of the missing china: Mrs. Danvers’ misplaced frustration would have literally interrupted their honeymoon had the cine film not interrupted itself. However, Fontaine is the real disruption; the cine film itself represents her as well.

Fontaine literally interrupts the honeymoon phase not once (the cottage by the sea), not twice (broken china), but thrice, belaboring about her shame during the cine film while Maxim consistently reassures her that her social status precludes her from shame, least of all from her servants. Before he verbalizes his inner conflict later (the enduring pain caused by Rebecca; the inherited imperative of lying/censoring), Fontaine's maladaptation is then merely an inability to assimilate to high society. She does not even dare to mention Rebecca; all the same, Maxim flies off the handle at the mention of “gossip.” Neither we nor Fontaine know what went wrong (besides knowing that “gossip” and Rebecca are linked), but it triggers a very painful scene to watch that now prefigures his anger. This time, he does not fly off the handle, but the tension is all the same. 

It is impossible to escape sharing Fontaine’s anguish when Maxim leaves a cryptic letter about leaving all day on business the very next morning. Nearly at our midpoint, Fontaine has failed to both a) adapt to Rebecca’s standards of high society and b) censor any actions or behaviors reminiscent of Rebecca. This is obviously something impossible for someone who has never met Rebecca and can garner no more information about her than her beauty, her death, or her refinement. The twist comes when all the lies surrounding her are revealed, except they aren’t.

Mrs. Danvers

In the process of adapting and censoring the du Maurier’s novel, Hitchcock managed to position his audience within the diegesis of the novel. In the novel, only the narrator knows Maxim killed Rebecca; thanks to the doctor, the other characters only know that she had cancer, then surmising her cause of death as suicide. In a true sense of adaptation- by not giving us the omnipotence and third-person perspective (Fontaine is in every scene) of the novel- he attaches the viewer to Fontaine so it is still her story; he censors the enabled uxoricide while keeping all of the suspense, repression, and psychological adaptation required of getting away with murder that made the novel a romantic thriller. He can deny this is a “Hitchcock picture” all he wants (something to which du Maurier’s estate took offense), but he could not have inserted such a simultaneously iconic and befitting architextual ending if it were not. 

Melodrama is definitely not part of Hitchcock’s reportoire, but it clearly influenced his cinematic toolbox. While he and du Maurier apparently both have a penchant for ambiguous endings, he must upend the original text to cinematically dramatize the queer (both bisexual and odd) connection of Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca. Despite the cinematic visualization of Mrs. Danvers in the burning house, Hitchcock still hints at Rebecca being the arsonist. Fontaine declares, “She’s gone mad. She’d rather destroy Manderley than see us happy here.” Not only does this bring back the question of haunting (thus possession) that Mrs. Danvers creepily asked earlier, but also of sex peversion: if Manderley is Rebecca as Hitchcock argues, then in her death, Mrs. Danvers is both physically and spiritually consumed by her love, Mrs. Denvers self-destructive consumption by her lust.

Hitchcock shoehorns these two scenes into the narrative not only in subtle (because subtextual and psychological) opposition to Breen’s Catholic censorship, but also clever distortion of Selznick’s contention for fidelitous adaptation. The honeymoon phase cine film scene/sequence serves as a midpoint synecdoche reflecting Maxim’s thrilling moral ambiguity and Fontaine’s innocent but desparate imperative for psychological adaptation. There was no room to analyze how Mrs. Van Hopper and her dead parents contribute to Fontaine’s sense of placelessness and sense of obligation/subservience, but there are parallels in her absent past and vapid present. This desparate adaptation/blind ambition reflects the contemporary state of Jewish Hollywood (utterly dependable but treated like dogshit) in relation to the bureaucratic Catholic high society. Mrs. Danvers seems to be an especial middle finger to Breen. Her choice to kill both herself and Manderley rather than- both physically and spiritually- die slowly watching the de Winters defile the beauty of the mansion, recalls Rebecca’s symbolism of both queerness and high society. At once Hitchcock critiques two self-destructive social taboos treated differently by censors across the Atlantic: simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of queerness and homophobia in the U.S., and hypocritical class distinctions in the U.K. At once, Hitchcock married the four imperatives of cinematic and psychological adaptation and censorship in a way that reflected his productive environment.