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• 1 2019-04-27T19:19:48-07:00 Prologue: An Unusual Column 30 plain 2019-05-13T08:28:40-07:00
  On April 14, 1940, the Washington Post published an unusually prophetic column. Written by Richard L. Coe, who was filling in for Nelson B. Bell, it 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 people involved in the making of a motion picture, likening them to sculptors, composers and authors, the person who “moulds the finished work” (Coe, 1940). 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 touch, 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 tenets 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 François Truffaut’s Hitchcock. But, as evidenced by Coe’s column, the acknowledgement that some directors had distinctive styles, and that having such a style is what made a director great, was born much earlier.
  
  Equally intriguing about Coe’s column is that he referenced Rebecca, one Hitchcock himself famously labeled “not a Hitchcock picture” (Truffaut, 1984). 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.
  
  These goals will attempt to be accomplished by examining the film’s disputed authorship; the tension between Hitchcock, producer David O. Selznick, and the author of the original novel, Daphne du Maurier. In addition competing with two well-known authors for a claim to primary authorship, Hitchcock also battled outside forces: the pressure of making his Hollywood debut, the fear of failure in America and thus having to return to England at the outset of World War II, and having to deal with a filmgoing public expecting a film worthy of du Maurier’s best-selling novel. Later in his career, after establishing himself as a household name and box office draw, Hitchcock would experience an unparalleled level of artistic freedom. During this period, he made some of his most notable films — Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960), the ones typically associated with his auteur status. This book argues that Hitchcock’s lack of artistic and commercial freedom during the creation of Rebecca makes it an essential film in understanding how Hitchcock functions as an auteur.