Rebecca as Essential Hitchcock or,
Why He Felt the Way He Did

I. Arriving in America

In the preceding section, I offered an auteurist videographic analysis of Rebecca to show that, despite Hitchcock’s claim to the contrary, it is indeed a “Hitchcock picture.” By viewing Hitchcock’s Rebecca through the lens of his filmography, we are able to understand how the film’s formal and thematic elements are Hitchcockian. However, this does not help us understand one of this Scalar book’s central questions: Why did Hitchcock feel the way he did about Rebecca? The answer lies in disputed authorship. Who is the author of Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier and produced by David O. Selznick?

Before Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood to begin shooting Rebecca in 1939, he was already a known and beloved entity, with international hits like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. As David Boyd notes in his essay, “The Trouble with Rebecca,” which is part of a larger edited volume, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor, “Hitchcock could scarcely have hoped for a more propitious beginning to his Hollywood career (Boyd, 2011).” The man who brought Hitchcock to America, the producer David O. Selznick, had finished work on what is now widely regarded (not by this reviewer) as his greatest achievement, Gone With the Wind (1939), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture three months prior to the premiere of Rebecca. People were eager to see what Selznick would do next, thus overshadowing the American debut of one Alfred Hitchcock. Further undermining Hitchcock’s American debut was the mere fact that his task was to adapt Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, which topped the best seller lists in 1938 and fuelled ticket sales two years later. Moviegoers at that time would have identified the story as du Maurier’s not Hitchcock’s. In fact, Selznick himself insisted that Hitchcock faithfully adhere to du Maurier’s story, much to the chagrin of the director. This section will explore disputed authorship by examining: the Hitchcock-Selznick relationship, the Hitchcock-du Maurier relationship, how the press treated each of these three authors, and the way in which Hitchcock asserted his authorship despite being in the presence of two authors who arguably had greater control.

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