:Rebecca:
This was Hitchcock’s first American film and his only best picture Oscar. He never won for best director although he was nominated several times. What a hose job.
Rebecca was a wonderful flick. Laurence Olivier played the frosty, imperious, tortured Maxim deWinter, Joan Fontaine (Olivia de Havilland’s sister) his innocent, lost young wife and Judith Anderson the mean as cat shit (and crazy as bat shit) housekeeper Mrs. Danvers.
This movie stayed mostly faithful to Daphne duMaurier’s extremely successful gothic novel of the same name. I won’t share the one significant difference out of a respect for spoilers. Hitchcock eventually made three of her novels into movies.
Rebecca follows these three characters as they interact with the (dead) first Mrs. DeWinter and their respective hatred, fear and love of her. She was a nasty bit of work whose death shadows nearly every scene, from the very beginning to the closing shot.
Her husband couldn’t stand her and felt tricked and manipulated in his marriage, finally driven to the breaking point by a woman neither du Maurier or Hitchcock provides any redeeming qualities for. Rebecca’s evilness is a given of the storyline and without it, actually, the whole thing falls apart. This isn’t a movie for you if you’re looking for a balanced view of an unhappy marriage.
The second wife is literally unnamed. She goes from being a poor, timid, child-like, young woman working a disagreeable job to the completely overwhelmed lady of a great manor thoroughly intimidated by Rebecca’s memory in the eyes of her husband and his household to an accomplished adult. She’s the character that really grows.
Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, harbors what a modern eye would suspect is a love that’s possibly Lesbian in nature (and indeed the censors of the time warned Hitchcock against overt Lesbianism in the portrayal of the relationship) for Rebecca. She is slavishly loyal to the dead woman’s memory and does, literally, everything within her power to stop the second wife from taking Rebecca’s place or the new couple from being happy.
This is a black and white movie that you can’t imagine in color. It’s creepy, powerful and beautiful. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend putting it on your bucket list.
:The Grapes of Wrath:
I loved this National Book Award and Pulitzer-prize winning novel by John Steinbeck when I read it in college and I *think* I’ve seen the movie once before.
However, on this go-through I found it too earnest for my tastes. As if director John Ford were trying too hard. As if the message were a bit forced.
The storyline centers around the bleak misfortunes of the Joad family who represent the great Okie migration to California in search of work and a better life during the dust bowl crisis of the Great Depression. Symbolically, the Joads are also meant to represent Job from the Old Testament and his many trials.
The movie is undoubtedly powerful and touching… Just a bit much, too.
The professional reviews are solid in their praise and I didn’t see my criticisms anywhere but it is my opinion that this movie didn’t live up to my memories of the book and, I’ll repeat myself, is just too earnest.
I have to go with Rebecca when choosing between the two.
Plum Librarian LLC 