First images from the surely misbegotten remake of "Rebecca"

by Nathaniel R

Armie Hammer and Lily James as Mr and Mrs de Winter

Netflix has released the first four images from their remake of Hitchcock's Rebecca which begins streaming on October 21st ---  Excuse us, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. People will be quick to note that it's less sacrilegious to adapt the novel than the 1940 best Picture winner. Now, we understand that remakes are not automatically "bad," but there are numerous reasons why remaking Hitchcock films, of all things, is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. For one, auteurs that get adjectives named ever them are inimitable and so you lose the distinct personality. For another, Hitchcock movies have (mostly) aged terrifically well; there's a reason people still watch a wide swath of them and so many are still easily available to the public, referenced in so many modern movies, and an intrinsic part of culture...

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New to the National Film Registry: Brokeback Mountain, Hud, etc...

by Nathaniel R

Each year in the thick of precursor awards season we are momentarily (and pleasantly!) asked to think about the entire history of motion pictures. Each December the Library of Congress adds 25 new movies to their list of American titles worthy of preservation. The criteria is "cultural, historic and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage."

The most recent inductee this year is Ang Lee's neo western gay classic Brokeback Mountain (2005) which is about as deserving as titles get for this honor. And we're personally thrilled to see the best movie of 1963, Hud, added. Here's the whole list chronologically...

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Say it Aint So! Rebecca (1940) is Getting a Remake

by Nathaniel R

Nooooo. Rebecca (1940) doesn't need to be remade. Essentially no Hitchcock picture needs to be, you know. But word is out that Lily James and Armie Hammer are risking the ghosts of Joan Fontaine and Sir Laurence Olivier to star in a new film version of the Daphne Du Maurier story about "the second Mrs de Winter," her cold bossy husband, a sinister lesbian housekeeper, and an old creepy gothic mansion. The foolish or ballsy director that's going to try to live up to collective memories of Alfred Hitchcock? That'd be Ben Wheatley of High-Rise and Free Fire fame. 

Hey, let's do a "Cast This!" in the comments for the story's best role: Mrs Danvers, that creepy housekeeper with an obsession for her late mistresses undergarments. (You may recall that The Film Experience spent a lot of time with Rebecca a few years ago for a pass-the-baton retrospective.)

Fontaine Centennial: Mrs de Winter in "Rebecca"

For the next few days we'll be celebrating Joan Fontaine's Centennial. Here's Eric on her most famous picture...

David O. Selznick, Joan Fontaine, and Alfred Hitchcock at the Oscars for Rebecca. The film won... but Fontaine and Hitch didn't.

One of the best things about writing for The Film Experience is the chance to open up windows of your film history you haven’t explored before.  For some reason, throughout all the years, I had never seen a movie with Joan Fontaine.  Just one of those black holes.  And because she stopped acting before I was born, I have zero frame of reference for her (unlike, say, sister Olivia de Havilland)... 

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Revisiting Rebecca (Pt 5): Burn It Down, Mrs Danvers

Previously on "Revisiting Rebecca"
Pt 1 - a whirlwind de Winter courtship
Pt 2 - return to Manderley, meet Mrs Danvers
Pt 3 - feel up Rebecca's lingerie
Pt 4 - attend a costume ball but don't jump out the window, young lady!
 

...And here is Jason, with our final installment.

1:44:50 We fade up from a kiss to a sign reading "Kerrith Board School 1872." It seems so exact it made me wonder if this is a real place, but a quick google comes up with nothing. I assume this, like most everything save the more obvious natural exteriors (the beaches filmed on the California coast, for example), was a set. It seems an odd detail to so prominently focus upon though. My guess is Hitch liked the connection to The Past, with it hanging over everyone – he was never exactly the most subtle with his themes.

In the Hitchcock/Truffaut book the two filmmakers discuss how "the location of [Manderley] is never specified in a geographical sense; it's completely isolated." Hitch actually talks at length about how he sees this possibility of isolation as an "American" thing -- that if Rebecca had been filmed in Great Britain he'd have shown the countryside surrounding the house but filming it in America gave him the possibility of this "abstraction." It certainly helps that whenever we’re seeing the mansion itself it’s always a miniature, and not an actual location. Anyway, here we are... Where ever here is!

Continue on to the final installment

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