Why He Felt the Way He Did
III. Authorship and the Press
The typo in the Los Angeles Times, while most likely accidental, is emblematic of the way the press covered Rebecca at the time of its release: Alfred Hitchcock was not given full credit for the film’s success. The film’s disputed authorship played out in the American press, with du Maurier, Selznick, and Hitchcock all being mentioned and given varying degrees of credit in newspaper articles, announcement, and reviews. Thus, to understand how this competition between authors may have influenced the way that Hitchcock felt the way he did about Rebecca, it is necessary to undergo an examination of press coverage of the time.
Hitchcock and the Press
In February 2019, I spent a week in Los Angeles, California, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, home to the papers of Alfred Hitchcock. I requested to see all files pertaining to Rebecca. Among the many screenplay drafts and memos that came off the shelves as part of my request, nothing interested me as much as what the final box contained. It was a scrapbook, full of photos, memos and newspaper clippings, mostly about Rebecca. While on the surface the most noteworthy piece of material found in the binder may have been a note from Clark Gable and Carole Lombard praising the film, the book itself raised interesting questions: Who made this scrapbook? What did Hitchcock think as he read these reviews? How did they shape the way he viewed and remembered Rebecca? While those questions may never be answered in full, we can get one step closer by examining articles published at the time. Clearly, Hitchcock cared enough about press clippings to have them preserved in a scrapbook. In Hitchcock and Selznick, Leff writes that Hitchcock had a fondness for the press, noting that upon his arrival in Los Angeles:
he remained fully awake to Hollywood’s advantages, particularly its access to media. Into autumn, Hitchcock continued to make excellent copy. Life, Newsweek, and Collier’s, which usually reserved their feature pages for the stars, profiled the self-assured, eccentric director while he worked on his first American film. His corrosive comments about producers delighted journalists and their readers. ‘He smiled a little cynically when he discussed producers,’ Douglas Churchill reported in The New York Times in October, but impishly refused to be quoted (Leff, 1999).
Leff’s work shows a director not only concerned with promoting his public image, but who viewed it as a fun and necessary step towards making it in Hollywood. Moreover, his eagerness to diminish the role of the producer shows that from early on Hitchcock was engaged in authorship disputes; he wanted to assert his authorship from the moment he began his career in the United States. Thus, it is easy to believe that Hitchcock would have cared how his films were promoted and reviewed in the press, and whether he was credited as the main author. In fact, Leff quotes Hitchcock as saying to Newsweek that Rebecca would “reflect no personality other than his own." Hitchcock’s comments at the time did not go unnoticed by Selznick. Leff notes that Selznick felt firm enough in his reputation not to retaliate or put a stop to Hitchcock’s public comments. “As long as Hitchcock played his act on the road and not in the executive offices,” Leff writes, “no one strenuously objected; his contract, after all, negated his claims to authorship.” Because Selznick was the boss and Hitchcock the employee, the former likely did not feel it necessary to publicly assert his authorship over the latter — that could be done in production, post-production, and in the press, and it was.
Authorship Dispute Plays Out in the Press
In order to understand how the press covered the production and subsequent release of Rebecca, I analyzed 43 articles published between January 1, 1939 and December 31, 1940 by six different publications: the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Christian Science Monitor. All of these articles contained two search terms: “Hitchcock” and “Rebecca.” It is important to note that I did not search for any articles that did not mention Hitchcock.To get a sense of how authorship played out in the press, I did an initial scan of all 43 articles and recorded who was mentioned in which order. The articles I examined ranged from full- length profiles and reviews to one or two sentences about the film, typically found as part of a larger gossip or movie news column. As the graph to the right indicates, Hitchcock was mentioned first in articles more than any other individual author.
But, note that Hitchcock is only mentioned first in 39.5 percent of the articles, meaning that in a majority of articles he is not credited first. What does this tell us? Not much. However, a deeper dive into these articles yields a more telling result.
For example, a March 28, 1940 article in the New York Times begins with, “David O. Selznick’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ will have its long deferred local premier this morning in the Radio City Music Hall. Alfred Hitchcock directed and the screen play was written by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison (New York Times, 1940).” These two sentences more or less describe how the film’s authorship was portrayed in the press: Selznick and du Maurier are given ownership of the film and story respectively, and Hitchcock is merely noted as the director. A March 19 article from the Los Angeles Times cited “David O. Selznick’s screen version of ‘Rebecca’” and noted that the film was “a cinematic translation of the Daphne du Maurier novel” (Los Angeles Times, 1940). The Boston Globe shared a similar view, beginning their March 22 article by noting that the film was “practically a perfect translation of Daphne du Maurier’s best selling novel into a picture" (Daily Boston Globe, 1940). A similar example came from Variety (a publication not part of the above analysis), which wrote on March 27, 1940, “[The] picture is noteworthy in its literal translation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel to the screen, presenting all of the somberness and dramatic tragedy of the book” (Variety, 1940). These reviews not only bolster du Maurier’s claim to authorship, but they greatly diminish Hitchcock’s. They write about the film as if Hitchcock provided no artistic vision of his own and merely blocked scenes to follow the novel.When Hitchcock is cited first, it is often merely to set up crediting another author. For example, a March 20, 1940 article from The Christian Science Monitor begins, “Alfred Hitchcock, who used to make thrillers in England but who has now transferred his activities to Hollywood, directed ‘Rebecca,’ film from Daphne du Maurier’s novel” (The Christian Science Monitor, 1940). Similarly, Douglas Churchill wrote on October 1, 1939 in the New York Times, “Alfred Hitchcock’s first brush with American production has left him a little confused. He is at work at Selznick-International on Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’” (Churchill, 1939). Thus, we see that even when Hitchcock is mentioned first in an article, it almost never because the writer is discussing, for example, “Hitchcock’s Rebecca.” Instead, it is merely a piece of news that a popular English director has made his way across the Atlantic to “translate” another author’s story for the screen.
Many of these articles do, however, praise Hitchcock for his work as director. For example, the aforementioned article from The Boston Globe reads, “Magnificently mounted, directed with all the famous Hitchcock skill, and imaginative in its development of plot, ‘Rebecca’ is a picture that ought to be a box office success from the very first day” (Daily Boston Globe, 1940). Thus, the summary of these articles is not that Hitchcock is not credited as director or praised for his work; rather, he is not given a true ownership stake in the film — he is not credited as an author. He is viewed as a great technician, as a great adaptor, but not as the auteur that we know he is in the film. Of course, the great exception to this is the Washington Post article by Richard Coe, which I quoted at the beginning of this scalar book. Coe was able to see both Hitchcock’s authorship and auteurship at play. However, most critics at the time, and understandably so, could only see the work of du Maurier.
