What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1940

The Year: 1940
What the Nominees Were: All This and Heaven Too, Foreign Correspondent, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town, The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Again, that’s a really great list. The Great McGinty was also a wonderful movie, and it won Original Screenplay, so it should have gotten a Picture nomination too.

What Should Have Won and Did Win: Rebecca
How Hard Was the Decision: One of the hardest decisions I had to make. The Philadelphia Story was by the same people as Holiday and it’s even better. If it had come out almost any other year, I would hand it the award. And I love The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Dictator. But Rebecca is better.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, Adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier
Stars: Lawrence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson and George Saunders 

The Story: An unnamed heroine, serving as travelling companion to a rich widow, enters into a whirlwind romance with suicidal zillionaire Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo. They marry and she must take over running his Cornish estate, but she cannot escape the shadow of his “beloved” first wife, Rebecca. Eventually the truth comes out: He hated Rebecca and killed her. The mad servant who loved Rebecca and hates our heroine burns down the mansion but our couple escapes to live happily ever after.

Other Nominations and Wins: It won Picture and Black and White Cinematography, it lost Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress for Anderson, Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing, Score and Special Effects.

Why It Won:

1. You may not notice on first watch that we never hear the heroine’s first name. You also might not notice that we never see Rebecca’s face, not even in flashbacks or photos or even portraits in the house. What’s the reason for these two odd choices, these two holes in the film? It turns the two women into doppelgangers of each other: The woman without a name and her other half, the woman without a face. That makes things much more disturbing and powerful. One of the most powerful moments is when the phone rings for Mrs. DeWinter, then Fontaine says “Mrs. DeWinter is dead” and hangs up, only to realize that call was probably for her, since she is, after all, the new Mrs. DeWinter (which is the closest she ever gets to a name.)
   
2. In the novel, Maxim confesses to his new wife that he killed Rebecca when she bragged of cuckolding him. Hollywood had a strict moral code at the time (enforced by Joseph Breen) that said you couldn’t make a movie about a killer who gets away with it. So, in the movie, he tells our heroine that he didn’t actually kill Rebecca: he was about to, but she tripped and died accidentally. That satisfied Breen, but we, thankfully have no reason to believe this very dubious story (which Maxim smartly tells no one except his besotted new wife). If he’s telling the truth, then this is a dumb, meaningless movie, but if he’s lying, then it’s gothic goodness. I, like every non-censor who saw the movie, enjoy it so much because I don’t believe Maxim for a second.
   
3. Hitchcock isn’t really remembered as an expressionist director, not in the same way that Fritz Lang and company were, but this movie expresses emotion through lighting in a way he didn’t usually do (shooting a whole scene through rain-streaked windows, for instance). It creates a painterly atmosphere not unlike Selznick’s previous picture Gone With the Wind, and helps explain why this was the only Hitchcock movie to win Best Picture.
   
4. Every time the heroine thinks she can escape Rebecca’s shadow, she finds another item with “R de W” embroidered on it. We realize that she will never be free to be mistress of the house until she has them all put in a bonfire and burned, but then she’d be that kind of second wife. She’s wonderfully trapped by embroidery.
5. (There was one place where Rebecca could be seen: On the poster. As a filmmaker, you can try to deny the audience something important, but Marketing won’t have that.)
   

Ah, 1940: Advice to Wives!