Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 34: Sat Feb 3

Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940): ICA Cinema, 12.45pm


An adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel, Rebecca was Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into Hollywood filmmaking and an inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film Phantom Thread. The film is being screened from February 2nd to 4th at the ICA, ahead of the screenings od Phantom Thread at the cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
'There are too many conflicting levels of authorship—between Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier, and David O. Selznick—for this 1940 film to be a complete success, but through its first two-thirds it is as perfect a myth of adolescence as any of the Disney films, documenting the childlike, nameless heroine's initiation into the adult mysteries of sex, death, and identity, and the impossibility of reconciling these forces with family strictures. As a Hitchcock film, it is, with the closely related Suspicion, one of his rare studies from a female point of view, and it is surprisingly tender and compassionate; the same issues, treated from a male viewpoint, would return in Vertigo and Marnie (Laurence Olivier's Maxim becoming the Sean Connery character of the latter film).'
Dave Kehr 

Here (and above) is the trailer.


 

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