Why He Felt the Way He Did
Introduction: The Auteur and Rebecca
On April 14, 1940, the Washington Post published an unusually prophetic column. It was by Richard L. Coe, who that day was filling in for Nelson B. Bell, and bore the title: “Film Directors Are Achieving Due Slowly.” Coe observed that film directors were finally on their way to being recognized as the most important person involved in the making of a motion picture, likening them to sculptors, composers and authors, the person who“moulds the finished work.”
If the readership of the Washington Post wanted proof of this, Coe wrote, they need only visit one of the local theatres and view John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Jean Renoir’s The Human Beast, or Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Coe continued to make his case for the third director under the column’s second subheading, “Hitchcock’s ‘Rebecca’ Illustrates Director’s Force.” It reads, in part:
Of them all, perhaps no other director has so pronounced a style as Alfred Hitchcock, whose “Rebecca” is not only a hit at the Palace, but is pencilled in for at least a fourth week at the Radio City Music Hall. Who said direction didn’t pay?
In the final, most interesting paragraph, which is preceded by the mention of Hitchcock’s “odd hobby” of appearing in his films, Coe writes:
But the time will come when the great directors will not have to sneak into their own films to be in the picture, so to speak. The recognition of the Capra touch, the Lubitsch, the Ford touch and the arts of Hitchcock, Renoir, Clair, McCarey and a few others are rapidly coming into the notice of the average filmgoer, that fellow who pays his money and reads the credit lines with the aim of finding out just how a film pulls itself together — for better or for worse.
Eleven years before the first issue of Cahiers du Cinema, this fill-in critic for the Washington Post articulated one of the core tenants of the auteur theory: that the director is the author of their work and, more specifically, had a style that, when understood, could be used to identify a film as their own. One of the chief directors associated with the auteur theory is, of course, Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of the “Hitchcock picture” entered the mainstream in 1966, with the publication of Francois Truffaut’s Hitchcock. But, as evidenced by Coe’s column, the acknowledgement that some directors had distinctive styles, and that having such a signature is what made a director great, was born much earlier.
What is equally intriguing about Coe’s column is that the Hitchcock film referenced is Rebecca, one the director himself famously labeled “not a Hitchcock picture.” The reasons for Hitchcock’s claim are myriad: disputed authorship, the realities of the Hollywood system, little recognition, and, as he observed, a lack of humor. The aim of this Scalar book is twofold. First, to undergo an auteurist reading of Rebecca to understand it as not only as an example of a “Hitchcock picture,” but an essential one to understanding Hitchcock as an auteur. Second, to explore why Hitchcock may have felt the way he did about the film, and why it does not sit among the upper echelons of Hitchcock’s filmography. {This is just a placeholder}