Movie 106* Rebecca

It has been a while, and that is all I am going to say about that. I have been putting off this movie for quite some time, mainly because from the surface there did not look to be anything interesting about this movie to me. Beggars cannot be choosers though, so I finally bit the bullet and watched this film.

Growing up in the era of the summer blockbuster, I knew this movie was not going to be paced anywhere near what I am used to with a film. In Hollywood nowadays a movie is long if it goes past an hour and a half. The movies that do go farther than that, usually have at least 3 story lines they are trying to keep you up to speed on at any given time. This movie focuses on one character for the entire two hours of film. There are very few scenes where the new Mrs. De Winter(Joan Fontaine) is not on screen. As expected, the setup for the story takes quite a while to get going.

I tried to stay open minded about the movie, but I never really got drawn in like I felt I should. Even reading other peoples reviews I understand the qualities of the film, but still do not think it is as good as many of the movies I have already watched and am to watch soon. Laurence Olivier's performance was pretty good, but his transitions from good guy to pissed off emotionally closed off man seemed to abrupt and forced to me. I think the best performance came from the main housekeeper Mrs. Danvers(Judith Anderson) who keeps her dark obsessed demeanor going throughout the film. Even Fontaine's performance seemed stale and repeated every time she came under stress.

I do see the sensory and emotional styles of Hitchcock in this film, but this being his first movie made for an American viewing audience, I think it was clearly a sign of better things to come. Again it is really hard for me not to be biased with this film spending much of my summers in theaters watching the next big thing, including Will Smiths 100 million dollar movie run, but I kind of view this movie as one where a lot of people just use the standard of older is better just because. A viewpoint that I do not share.

Overall it is definitely a movie of the time period, and the ending keeps this movie from being a snore fest. The last 45 minutes keep the pace up enough to make it bearable and actually give you some story to really chew on, rather than the few small pieces every 20 minutes given in the first two thirds of the movie.

Score: 7.9 And that is a generous "benefit of the doubt" score.