Rebecca/Netflix
If you have not seen the Alfred Hitchcock 1940 version with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, nor read Daphne du Maurier’s novel, you might enjoy this recent adaptation which director Ben Wheatley is anxious to point out is not a remake.
The plot of two Mrs de Winters – one dying in a boat and the other a mousy companion to the horrendous Mrs Van Toppen (Ann Dowd) – remains a constant in all three versions.
Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) meets his second wife (Lily James, but she is never named) on holiday in Monte Carlo and whisks her back as his bride to Manderlay where Mrs Danvers (Kirstin Scott Thomas) does her best to give her the coldest of receptions.
In the book Rebecca dominates but in this version the second wife does as she is virtually in every scene.
Manderlay is here a sort of gothic Downton Abbey with upstairs and downstairs servants and the forbidding Mrs Danvers, lady and mistress of all she surveys.
The novel hinted at a lesbian relationship between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca.
The film is more overt.
The problem is that Lily James has to portray a mouse that becomes a lioness, a sexy ingenue and modern resilient woman and it’s all too much.
In the book and 1940 film she is half Maxim de Winter’s age, but the gorgeous scenes in the South of France became a back-drop to an improbable tryst of lovers and suitors the same age.
Not does Armie Hammer portray, in a nuanced way, the darker side of Maxim.
In the 1940 film the ending of Maxim murdering Rebecca has to be changed.
Our resident Rust authority on Daphne du Maurier believes that her literary heroine would have approved of the James depiction but you cannot be sure.
Daphne du Maurier was a big admirer of the Bronte sisters, who were brought up by their Cornish aunt, and the dark brooding woods of the Menabilly Estate where Du Maurier lived are reminiscent of the moors in Wuthering Heights and are depicted as Manderlay.
None of this scary locale appears in the film.
It’s always going to be tough to make a film where the novel and first film are both so successful.
Probably the best was Godfather II but director Francis Dord Coppola went back in time to the youth of the Godfather played by Robert di Niro and it was stand alone.
Whatever you call this Rebecca it neither bears comparison with the novel, nor Hitchcock film, nor stands in its own right.
