Originally Posted by Citizen Rules It's very telling that Joan's character has no name. Think about it, we never hear her first name she's always refereed to as Mrs de Winter
You know, I never even noticed that. Though I'm pretty bad with names anyway haha.
Yeah me too! I'm so crummy with names in movies that I can watch the entire movie and still not know the main character's name. I only learned that Joan Fontaine didn't have a name in
Rebecca while watching the DVD extras. The extras had interviews with half a dozen noted film historians, really interesting stuff! I learned that:
Rebecca was Hitch's first Hollywood film. He had been wanting to come to America for awhile as he knew there would be more advance film making equipment for him to use, and he was very interested in film technology. Producer David O Selznick who headed up the new (at the time) Selznick International studio brought Hitch over and they had planned to make a movie of Titanic. Selznick even bought a large ship and took Hitch down to the port to see it, but they could never come up with a working script.
So they moved onto Rebecca as it was a popular novel which both men were keen to make. Hitch had tried to buy the rights to it but couldn't afford it. Selznick could and had bought the rights to it.
Hitch's film making style was to take a novel and rearrange it, to suit the way he wanted to tell the story. Selznick believed a film should closely follow the novel, as he had done with
Gone With The Wind, which was also in production at the time
Rebecca was starting up.
David O Selznick was a producer who had a lot of input into the films he made, efficiently being an auteur producer. Hitch of course always put his own auteur stamp on the films that he made. So as you can guess this put the two men at odds. Selznick would come by the set to watch the film making, and Hitch would 'mysteriously' have camera problems until Selznick left, then shooting would resume, ha.
Rebecca does from what I heard follow the novel fairly closely, thanks to Selznick...with the exception of the guilt of Maxim, which was necessary for a happy ending.
Oh one more thing, Selznick at one time wanted Hitch to do the burning of Manderley with the last shot of the movie being smoke rising up in the sky making a giant
R....
That's cringe worthy! Luckily Hitch wouldn't do it.