Rebecca (BLU-RAY)
Romance becomes psychodrama in the elegantly crafted Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into Hollywood filmmaking. A dreamlike adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, the film stars the enchanting Joan Fontaine as a young woman who believes she has found her heart’s desire when she marries the dashing aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter (played with cunning vulnerability by Laurence Olivier). But upon moving to Manderley—her groom’s baroque ancestral mansion—she soon learns that his deceased wife haunts not only the estate but the temperamental, brooding Maxim as well. The start of Hitchcock’s legendary collaboration with producer David O. Selznick, this elegiac gothic vision, captured in stunning black and white by George Barnes, took home the Academy Awards for best picture and best cinematography.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration
- Audio commentary from 1990 featuring film scholar Leonard J. Leff
- Isolated music and effects track
- New conversation between film critic and author Molly Haskell and scholar Patricia White
- New interview with film historian Craig Barron on Rebecca’s visual effects
- Daphne du Maurier: In the Footsteps of “Rebecca,” a 2016 French television documentary
- Making-of documentary from 2007
- Footage of screen, hair, makeup, and costume tests for actors Joan Fontaine, Anne Baxter, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Sullavan, and Loretta Young
- Casting gallery with notes by director Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick
- Hitchcock interviewed by Tom Snyder on a 1973 episode of NBC’s Tomorrow
- Tomorrow interview with Fontaine from 1980
- Audio interviews from 1986 with actor Judith Anderson and Fontaine
- Three radio versions of Rebecca, from 1938, 1941, and 1950, including Orson Welles’s adaptation of the novel for the Mercury Theatre
- Theatrical rerelease trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic and Selznick biographer David Thomson and selected Selznick production correspondence, including with Hitchcock