This is one of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movies. He takes you from feelings of pity to joy to sorrow to fear...he's just a master of pulling as much as he can out of a viewer. It's funny because there aren't too many movies where I feel like reaching through the screen and helping the lead actress from being just so darned pitiful. By the end of the movie she does happen to grow a backbone though...thank goodness for that!
This Gothic thriller is piled high with mystery...mostly the mystery of the former lady of the house named Rebecca. But first let me just tell you that this movie has one of the best opening narratives that just sucks you right in...
Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done. But as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it. Nature had come into her own again, and little by little had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers, on and on while the poor thread that had once been our drive. And finally, there was Manderley - Manderley - secretive and silent. Time could not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls. Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, and suddenly it seemed to me that light came from the windows. And then a cloud came upon the moon and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it. I looked upon a desolate shell, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again. That much is certain. But sometimes, in my dreams, I do go back to the strange days of my life which began for me in the south of France...
You would think that at about the age of 3 the sippy cup would become a thing of the past.
