Our heroine is never named other than with the pronoun “I,” and is portrayed by the then somewhat-unknown Joan Fontaine (sister of Olivia De Havilland), who offers up one of history’s most impressive “arrivals” as a full-blown movie star. Our heroine is an innocent who’s terribly vulnerable and a newlywed very much in love with her husband, Maxim (Laurence Olivier), a deeply troubled man still working through the death of his first wife.

Swept off her feet, this orphan who made un undignified living as a paid companion and doormat to an insufferable woman, is suddenly thrust into a world she never knew existed. Maxim is incredibly wealthy and sole-owner of Manderley, a breathtakingly gothic estate populated with servants and also the intimidating and suffocating shadow of Rebecca, Maxim’s dead wife.

It’s within this shadow that the new mistress of the house, already a fragile flower, wilts even further. Rebecca’s hold on the living is supernatural and the primary keeper of that flame is housekeeper Miss Mrs. Danvers (an unforgettable Judith Anderson), who wields the memory of her former mistress like a psychological club to break down her “replacement.” Miss Danvers is destined to succeed until a shipwreck uncovers truths that will either result in the destruction of all involved or their salvation.

Thanks to my notoriously bad memory, I had almost completely forgotten the plot of the film and did forget the outcome of the mystery. And what a treat it was to rediscover this spellbinding two hours full of unexpected twists and the kind of suspense Hitchcock perfected, that which comes from a man who unknowingly puts the woman he loves in terrible danger and finds he can only save her by crossing an emotional Rubicon.

“Rebecca’s” show-stopper is the masterful scene in which Maxim finally tells his full story, when the pieces of all that came before are made to make sense and come together. This is a moment of flashback that isn’t a flashback and one that only an actor and director in full command of their powers and perfectly in tune with one another could pull off.

But the real star here is Fontaine, who would go on the following year to work again with Hitchcock in “Suspicion” and win the Oscar for Best Actress. Selznick, hoping to recreate the public relations boost his search for Scarlett O’Hara created, auditioned anyone and everyone, but most certainly made the perfect choice. Fontaine’s beauty takes your breath away, but there is no more difficult persona to pull off than that of an innocent, and this the actress does flawlessly.

One of the pitfalls for Fontaine in playing this nameless heroine was not only the risk of melodramatic, wide-eyed pathos, but in not taxing the patience of the audience with a one-note performance that drains our sympathy through the act of being a perpetual victim. Through the hard work of plotting and characterization, a fine script certainly does some of the heavy-lifting, but it’s the bottomless depth of Fontaine’s eyes that does the real storytelling and communicates that it’s worth hanging in there because there’s much to be discovered in this woman.

As is always the case with timeless films and most of what this Golden Age of Hollywood produced, the essential basics of storytelling are all in place. Though the run-time is 130 minutes, the pacing is perfect and the plot engrossing from beginning to end. And, of course, the black and white photography — that comes alive on Blu-ray — and production design are about as good as it gets.

The Selznick Empire might’ve burnt out quickly, but the style itself has been made immortal thanks to a producer obsessed with perfection and a remarkable eye for talent.

“Rebecca” is available at Amazon.

Joan Fontaine, Rebecca, 1940.

In 1939, Joan Fontaine, twenty-one years old, was slowly making her way up the Hollywood ladder. MGM signed Fontaine to play a small part in the high profile production The Women, directed by George Cukor, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard. For the young actress it was a plum assignment.

At the same time, Fontaine was subject to numerous tests for the star-making role of the second Mrs. De Winter for David O. Selznick’s Rebecca, first under the direction of John Cromwell and then Alfred Hitchcock. Screen tests are grueling and the emotional toll is devastating. During this period of her life Fontaine’s nerves were seriously frayed.

Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland lived in the same house in North Hollywood with their domineering mother Lilian, a failed actress. As always, Joan and Olivia were engaged in a low-intensity conflict, which continues tot his very day. And like so many Hollywood actresses, Fontaine’s father was long gone.

Fontaine freely admits that she had a thing for older men. Ambitious but deeply vulnerable the young woman was looking for security and a “protector.”

She already had a brief affair with her childhood idol, the handsome leading man Conrad Nagel. Her description of their first intimacy is less than passionate:

The whole experience had been no more than a quick surgical violation conducted with considerable modesty and no conversation. It reminded me of the time when I had to stand up in class as a child and be vaccinated. This just wasn’t as neat… and hurt more. Yet I was smugly pleased that I could now consider myself an adult.

Fontaine’s clinical detachment is best understood in context. She just wrapped production on Gunga Din. Her role was small, but her dewy innocence left an indelible impression on producers and directors. Fontaine confesses that during production she girlishly day-dreamed about her director, George Stevens, another older man.

Enter Brian Aherne, a respected British stage actor making a name for himself in Hollywood. He was charming, handsome and of course older.

Quick as a jump-cut, Fontaine and Aherne were engaged. But the night before the wedding, Aherne’s friend, director Jean Negulesco, called Joan and told her that Brian had cold feet and wanted to call off the wedding. Unwilling to be publicly humiliated Fontaine told Negulesco that she would be at the church at the appointed time. Brian could take it from there. If he wanted to divorce her the next day, he could.

Joan Fontaine and Brian Aherne.

Aherene did show up and the unhappy couple pronounced their wedding vows.

In addition to the emotional dysfunction Fontaine recently had a wisdom tooth extracted. Her jaw was swollen and aching. Aherne’s sinuses were acting up.

Right after the wedding reception, the newlyweds drove in Aherne’s light blue Packard convertible to San Francisco’s swanky Fairmont Hotel, without ever discussing Negulesco’s midnight phone call.

In her fine memoir, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine describes the honeymoon:

After ordering champagne and dinner, we both changed our clothes, I into a white lace-trimmed negligee, Brian into a navy-blue-and-red patterned dressing gown. He hoped I’d excuse the worn elbows; he’d ordered a new robe from his tailor in London, but it  would take months to deliver. After a knock at the door, our dinner was served in our suite by a bevy of unctuous waiters. The door finally closed on the embarrassed newlyweds, the thirty-seven-year-old groom, the twenty-one-year-old bride.

During dinner, perhaps to conceal his apprehension, Brian recounted his previous romance with Marlene Dietrich, his affection for her daughter Maria. He got up from the table to illustrate ballet steps he taught the child, having learned then while going to the Italia Conti Drama School in London. He asked me if I would object if he took Maria out one night a week. Pulling myself together, I replied, “No, not if I can go out with Conrad Nagel on those nights.” He never mentioned it again, though Marlene called him several times during our marriage to ask his advice about her daughter.

With Brian pirouetting about the room, his dressing gown flapping, its tassels waving in the air, I grew increasingly numb. The foghorns in the bay hooted their melancholy warning, the plaintive sounds I remembered from my childhood.

Finally, closing the bedroom door behind us, Brian said he wished he’d remembered to pack a hot-water bottle for his sinuses. I could have used an ice bag on my aching cheek. The lights were turned out. Somewhere, from the cornice of the hotel room, I felt, Mother was watching.

During the night, I rose quietly, slipped on my negligee, and went into the adjoining room. I huddled on a marble window ledge and watched the fog whirl past our Nob Hill aerie. Brian found me asleep there in the early morning. Mrs. Aherne had a wedding night not to remember.

The honeymoon was definitely over.

Fontaine went on to win the first of her three Best Actress Academy Awards for Rebecca. Aherne’s career went cold as their marriage. They finally divorced in 1945.

Sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.

No kidding, professor.

No, really, they are. I don’t mean in all the right places, of course, but somewhere else, with movies, in enjoying the things we see in the movies. 

I remember seeing Gunga Din (1939) for the first time and knowing from the opening shot that this was my kind of film. This was a guy film. Not a wishy-washy movie filled up with dance numbers and kissing scenes, but a guy flick. Great guy stuff was in this movie, and I was sold on it from the first pounding of that thunderous mighty gong. When Alfred Newman’s score turned from playful to ominous faster than you can say, ‘trouble in Tantrapur’, I knew I was in for a good one. This was the kind of movie you watched on a Saturday afternoon with your dad or with your pals. This was adventure! 

There’s no way, I had always thought, that a girl can appreciate this kind of film, that she can ‘get into’ Gunga Din and get out of it what I got out of it. There’s just no way. Would she be able to feel the same way I did, the way other guys do, when watching Victor McLaglen face quickly turn from stone to fraudulent smile as he tries to trick his buddy? Can she feel the same rush of pride when hearing the trumpet scream the battle cry, or when seeing the Sikh Cavalry charge against the 400 horsemen of Kali? Does she get choked up along with Mac, Cutter and Bal when Montagu Love reads Kipling’s reflective poem in that final scene? Is modern woman capable of this? Or will she be more concerned with the sole female character in the story, trying, naturally, to relate to her instead? These things I wondered. Yet, I was as certain of the answers to these questions as I was of Sergeant Ballantine’s destiny. No woman could do these things, bridge that crevasse away from the familiar into pure guy territory, where it’s always double drill and no canteen. It just isn’t done. 

But guess what? I was wrong. Completely wrong. In fact, I’ll go out on an already shaky rope bridge here and state I’ve never met a woman who didn’t like Gunga Din. That’s right, not one.  Sure, it’s got funny and handsome Cary Grant – what woman doesn’t love Cary? For that matter, what man doesn’t want to be him, including? And it’s got the dashing Douglas Fairbanks Jr. with that infectious smile and shock of hair that falls down great when he lunges with either saber, pistol or right hook into an opponent.  I mean, let’s face it, what female doesn’t like to watch these two guys at rest or in motion? But that’s not it, that’s not the reason they like Gunga Din, well not completely, anyway. 

I believe it’s actually closer to what happens in the scene in the temple when our three British soldiers plus one, are caught and imprisoned in the confines of that locked dungeon, complete with pit of snakes. Comically, with torture and certain death if they don’t figure a way out soon, all the ‘proud ox’ MacChesney can think of is retrieving Sergeant Ballantine’s signed reenlistment form, securing his buddy’s companionship and saving him from what he believes is a death far worse than any pit of snakes could ever inflict: married life.  The means he goes about trying to get his hands on that paper is a joy to behold. His phony fear of snakes and being lashed again is, like so many other Victor McLaglen moments, lovable and priceless.  It really is, I believe, this kind of friendly sparring and not so much the looks and charm of the other two leading men, that is the key. The loyalty, friendship and devotion to one’s chums, the camaraderie replete with fun-loving jabs and good natured mocking is what wins the day for the viewer and makes these kinds of films work so well and on so many personally appealing levels.   

An equally shocking discovery I made about Gunga Din is that not only do the women I know love this movie, but that they dislike the love interest, the fiance, Emmy with equal passion. No, not for the cliched reasons like ‘she’s not a strong character’ and all that baloney. No, that’s not it. And anyway, it’s not true since, under the circumstances, she’s pretty darn strong. So what don’t they like about her? The same thing George Stevens, Ben Hecht and I don’t like about her. They hate what she’s trying to do. The women I know hate the fact that Sergeant Ballantine’s lover wants to take him away from his pals, from the adventure, from life itself, to go into the tea business, of all things. They, like Cutter and Mac, want that siren to fail.

In real life there are not many women who would give up a life of luxury, lucrative profits in a very promising business in order to let a husband run off and reenlist in the thankless job of Her Majesty’s service. Nor are there many women who want their men to go up against elephants on rope bridges or Kali worshiping stranglers as a line of work. Not many at all. Probably not even one. And that makes a lot of sense. So, why do women when watching Gunga Din want Bal to join Cutter and Mac (and Din) and do precisely that in the movie? Is the answer simply to be explained away as yet another unfathomable layer of the complex nature of woman, the incomprehensibility of the fairer sex to the brutish mind of man? 

Beats me. 

So, I asked myself, why do women want a fellow woman’s plans stopped, granted not in the same feverish way Eduardo Ciannelli’s high priest wants to stop the British Empire with his much copied crescendo-building “Kill for the Love of Killing” speech, but definitely stopped. Why do women want Cutter and Mac to succeed in their scheme to reenlist their friend and take him away from the woman in the story?  This question puzzled me. It nagged at my inner man. Then, one day, quite unexpectedly,  I had an epiphany, a stroke of genius. It was one of those ‘eureka moments’, the kind you hear about, the kind that make you jump out of the bath, covered in soapy suds and run out into the street yelling at the top of your lungs, “I’VE GOT IT!! I’VE GOT IT!!” 

For the record, I’d suggest not expressing yourself in that way, exactly. Unless, of course you have a very good lawyer or a burning desire to see the inside of a psychiatric ward.  I have neither, so it’s fortunate that I came to my senses before I cleared the door jam and therefore was not forced to scribe this article onto a thick stone wall with a dull spoon. 

What I figured out amongst the bubbles was this: Women want men. Again, no kidding. No, hold on. That’s not it, exactly. Women want other men. Wait a minute, that’s not quite right, either. Let’s try again. Women want what other women want and that includes men. Yeah, that’s what I mean, sort of. 

Or to put it another way, in the form of a question, I came up with this: What woman, besides Joan Fontaine’s Emmy, would desire a domesticated Douglas Fairbanks who does very little else aside from selling tea and reading the paper? None. What woman would want a Douglas Fairbanks riding a horse, crossing swords with bad guys, getting trapped, imprisoned, escaping “by sheer strategy alone” and saving not only his chums, but the whole bloomin’ regiment, king and country, with a little help from his friends? 

Every woman, that’s who! At least I think so. 

Because, that’s the figure of a man. A man acts. He doesn’t necessarily think. For good or bad, he just does. And then another revelation occurred to me, not at the same time, thankfully, and not involving suds, but still noteworthy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a theory about men and women and it sort of ties in with all of this. I’ll restate part of it here briefly:

Men are simple. Women are complicated. 

Men live in the past. Women live in the future.  

(I have a sneaking suspicion children are the only ones who live in the present)

Here’s the big one: 

Women plan. Men dream.

When men become more like women – no not that way -  but when they stop dreaming as men dream, stop being reckless, stop living the adventure, stop thinking anything is possible (even if it clearly isn’t), stop acting, stop doing, when they cease to do these things, be these things, something has happened to them. 

They’ve grown old.

What I mean is, they’ve given up the ability to dream. They may not be old in years, but in spirit they are dusty cobwebs. They may not even know it happened to them until much later, well after the woman in their lives knows it. That’s something I’ll have to remind myself of from time to time, no doubt. 

When I think on other films that are called ‘guy flicks’ or ‘buddy movies’ there are so many that I love that I won’t even attempt to begin to list them. I will say, though, that along with Gunga Din (1939), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Sea Hawk (1940), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Sahara (1943), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) are some of my favorite guy movies of all time, which honor things like honor, duty and the undying capacity to dream large, even when all around them is a nightmare. These are films I never get tired of watching, nor ever will. There are others, lots more, and even some that are more recent, that have similar appeal. Braveheart comes to mind. But for the most part, these newer films are missing something that their predecessors have.  Maybe it’s the technicolor, or the monochrome for that matter, or just maybe, it’s the writing, the way in which dialogue plays such a dominant role in shaping the characters. I tend to think that’s the reason. Then again, maybe it’s just because I saw most of them as a kid. Who knows? Not me, and frankly, I don’t think I really want to know.  Because I’d rather dream. 

But, yes, these are some of my favorites, and it’s interesting that all of them, yes, all of them, are some of my female friends’ favorites as well. What does that say? That I hang around a bunch of butch chicks? No, I hope it doesn’t say that. It says that there are films about men, that don’t get all mushy, that women truly love for the same reasons men do. It says that women can sit and watch a film about men with no female character they can associate with, or even like in the story and come away thoroughly thrilled at the outcome. 

So, are these guy flicks, or not? I guess not. They’re more than that. They’re great flicks. They speak to both men and women as loud and clear as Din’s trumpeting. But how are they able to do that? What do they have in common? They were all written by people who could write. Sure they are genre, but they aren’t hackneyed, formulaic. And most of all, they weren’t supposed to appeal to just men, or just women, or just kids, or just adults. They were meant to be enjoyed by everyone. Their message however politically incorrect some may find it, is universal.  And that’s why they are hard to find nowadays. Because today, it’s all about pitching to a niche. Everything has to have a target audience, a market to aim for, a demographic to appease, please and all to often, pander to. 

Great films don’t do that. Not guy flicks, not chick flicks, not any flicks. Great is great. And great films charge ahead into the breech not caring what this or that group thinks is proper or offensive. We’re missing that kind of courage today.  And our culture is suffering because of it.  These days, we hear a lot about so-called controversial films. Yet no filmmaker seems daring enough to take a chance at being great, at dreaming large. Why should they when it’s so much easier to pander? 

There’s a scene in another great, though entirely different film that captures and defines the essence of what a man is, what he wishes he was, and what he wants other men to see him as. 

At the end of The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager takes his Lockheed F-104 Starfighter up to where the sky ends and space itself begins. He’s so far up that there isn’t enough oxygen in the air to fully power the turbine anymore. His engine quits. He spins out of control amongst the vast stars and great heavens above, falling to earth like Icarus with melted wings. 

But unlike the Greek, there is no ocean to catch him. Only the brutally harsh and unforgiving desert of Edwards. 

With frantic eyes peering past hope at the funereal black smoke on the horizon, the ambulance driver suddenly spots a lone figure in the distance walking toward them, shimmering in the blurry heat like a mirage – or a god. We see he is burnt, bloody and limping. It’s Yeager, and he’s carrying his helmet and parachute. 

“Is that a man?”, the driver asks Ridley, fellow test pilot and Yeager’s best friend. 

Grinning ear to ear, Ridley replies, “You’re damn right it is!”

Something tells me Emmy would agree.