{"id":171,"date":"2013-03-01T06:00:05","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T06:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neilsinyard.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=171"},"modified":"2024-10-17T07:14:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T06:14:41","slug":"daphne-du-maurier-and-alfred-hitchcock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/neilsinyard.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=171","title":{"rendered":"Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock"},"content":{"rendered":"

by NEIL SINYARD<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_Rebecca_Danvers\"
\nI was tempted to sub-title this talk ‘The Mistress of Romance meets The Master of Suspense’, except that there\u2019s more to Daphne du Maurier than Romance and more to Alfred Hitchcock than Suspense. Actually, to the best of my knowledge, they never did meet, certainly not socially, and there are slightly unusual aspects to this. For example, Hitchcock was actually a friend of Daphne\u2019s father, Sir Gerald du Maurier, who appeared in one of his films, Waltzes from Vienna<\/em> (1933) and whom Hitchcock described to Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut as \u2018in my opinion, the best actor anywhere\u2019. He did want to make a film of one of the Bulldog Drummond stories with Gerald du Maurier; and it is sometimes said that the main character of one of Hitchcock\u2019s early talkies, Murder <\/em> (1930) – about a distinguished actor who is on a jury that finds a young woman guilty of murder but who then begins to suspect that there may have been a miscarriage of justice – was actually modelled on Gerald du Maurier. (The part is played in the film by Herbert Marshall.) Both of them, incidentally, were great practical jokers and Hitchcock\u2019s most successful one played on Sir Gerald was an occasion when he invited him to a fancy dress party. Sir Gerald turned up in greasepaint and wearing a kilt, only to discover that it was a formal black tie and tails affair, and he had to bid a hasty retreat.<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_JamaicaInn\"
\nThe fact that Hitchcock knew father Sir Gerald much better than daughter Daphne is also striking because Hitchcock was to adapt three of Daphne du Maurier\u2019s works for the screen. Of the 50-odd feature films Hitchcock made, most of which are adaptations of novels, short stories or plays, there is no other writer I can think of offhand whom Hitchcock adapts more than once, and yet there are three du Maurier adaptations. One of them, Jamaica Inn<\/em>, which was the last film he made in England before his departure to America in 1939, is self-confessedly one of his lesser works. Hitchcock himself described it as \u2018an absurd thing to undertake\u2019, and one of the best critics of Hitchcock\u2019s English period, Charles Barr has said that \u2018it is almost alone among Hitchcock\u2019s films in containing no felicitous scene or line or detail that gets remembered and quoted, or that deserves to be\u2019. The other two, however, Rebecca<\/em> (1940) and The Birds<\/em> (1963) are two of Hitchcock\u2019s most important films, and two particularly fascinating examples of du Maurier adaptations for the screen, because they could not be further apart: one, a novel, the other a short story, so one requires compression whilst the other requires expansion; and one that sticks fairly close to the original text, whereas the other departs almost completely from the original apart from retaining the basic situation. Not surprising perhaps that the author herself was said to be delighted with the first and horrified by the second.<\/p>\n

Still, it does prompt the question: what was it about Daphne du Maurier\u2019s work that stimulated Hitchcock\u2019s interest and encouraged him to adapt her more than any other author? I think there were two things that Hitchcock particularly responded to:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The thing he seems to have admired most in writers is what one might call good craftsmanship, a fascinating story well told within a solid structure. He wasn\u2019t a fan of florid writing, of a literary style that drew attention to itself, or of modernist experimentation, or of Art for Art\u2019s Sake. This, I think, derives from his theatre-going as a young man around the early 1920s where he was a great admirer of the so-called well-made play, the kind of literature that unobtrusively held your attention and where all the parts were seen to fit together. (Hitchcock\u2019s admiration for John Russell Taylor\u2019s book on the subject of the well-made play is thought to have encouraged him to invite Taylor to write his authorised biography.) There might be a lot of subtler things going on under the surface in these plays, but these could be uncovered later. The immediate thing is that your attention is held by a good yarn and interesting characters. I think he saw Daphne du Maurier in that same tradition of writers like John Buchan, Marie Belloc Lowndes, J.M. Barrie, J.B. Priestley, John Galsworthy: i.e. writers who tended to become unfashionable in the middle of the last century and to be downgraded in academic circles for being middlebrow, conventional, technically unadventurous etc, but who wrote accessibly, entertainingly and successfully for a mass readership.<\/p>\n

The second thing that might have attracted him is something that du Maurier says in her introduction to one of her short story anthologies: \u2018I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the unexplained, the darker side of life, the macabre.\u2019 That would certainly appeal to a director who, when criticised for the illogicality of his plots, would reply, \u2018I have a saying to myself: logic is dull\u2019; and who once said, \u2018I have brought murder back into the home, where it belongs\u2019. He was certainly fascinated by the darker side of life, by the extremities of violent passion, and, according to some biographers, he had his own dark side, so there\u2019s definitely a kinship between the two there.<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_Rebecca_Selznick\"
\nSo: to move onto Rebecca<\/em>, Daphne du Maurier\u2019s novel, which had been published to huge popular success in 1938 and I believe has never been out of print since. It was Hitchcock\u2019s first American film (a bit ironic, this, since it was a very British subject, and most of the main cast were British) and produced by the mercurial mogul, David Selznick, who had just had a colossal success with Gone with the Wind<\/em>. He was the man who had lured Hitchcock to America and put him under contract; and, for a while, they had discussed making a film about the Titanic before fixing on Rebecca<\/em> for their first collaboration. Immediately conflict arose. Hitchcock wanted to open out the novel a bit and also introduce a lot more comedy. He invariably felt a bit uneasy if he couldn\u2019t inject some humour into his material: even when he came to make Psycho<\/em>, he thought of it as a fun film. Selznick was horrified by what he was proposing and insisted that they stick to the story, because that was what lovers of the novel would expect and would pay to see. Over and above that conflict of approach, there was inevitably the usual adaptation problem of how you condense a 400 page novel into a two hour film. As David Lean said when discussing his classic film adaptations of Dickens, Great Expectations<\/em> and Oliver Twist<\/em>: \u2018The thing not to do is try a put a little bit of every scene of the novel into your film, because it\u2019s going to end up a mess. Choose what you want to do in the novel, and do it proud.\u2019 The challenge remains the same: how to turn words, even thoughts, into images. But, of course, what you choose to include- and exclude- will be very revealing not simply about how you are, as it were, illustrating the novel but how you are interpreting it. There was another important issue with regard to the adaptation of Rebecca<\/em> for the screen, and that was the issue of censorship. The hero might have been allowed to get away with murder in the novel, but, given the Hollywood Production Code at the time, this was certainly not permissible in the film so the adaptation had to contrive another set of circumstances whereby Maxim could plausibly feel a sense of guilt over Rebecca\u2019s death without actually having killed her.<\/p>\n

\"Sinyard_Rebecca_group\"
\nIn a moment I want to discuss an extract from the film but just to set the context for you. Many of you will know the plot of Rebecca<\/em> at least as well as I do, but there are some differences from the novel in the film. A young unnamed heroine (played in the film by Joan Fontaine) is accompanying her employer, Mrs Van Hopper (Florence Bates) as a paid companion on holiday in Monte Carlo. She meets the mysterious Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who in the film we first meet standing perilously close to the edge of a cliff, staring down into the sea below, and looking for all the world as if he\u2019s about to jump: the young woman cries out to him in alarm and breaks the spell. We learn that he\u2019s the owner of one of the grandest country houses in England, Manderley, and that he was married to Rebecca, who died in a boating accident a year before and whom, so they say, he adored. To the young woman\u2019s astonishment- and we never do learn her name (when Hitchcock suggested calling her Daphne, Selznick was appalled)- Maxim begins paying her attention; and when it seems as if she might have to go to New York with her employer, he proposes marriage. She\u2019s astounded- how can someone like him be interested in someone like her?- but accepts, of course, because by this time she\u2019s madly in love with him.<\/p>\n

When they arrive at Manderley, she\u2019s completely overawed by her surroundings, seeming (and looking) a bit like a commoner in a palace surrounded by royalty. More than that, though, there are reminders of Rebecca everywhere- initialled pillowcases, stationery, monogrammed handkerchiefs etc.- and incessant talk of Rebecca\u2019s brains, beauty, breeding, which only serve to make her feel even more insecure and inadequate and feel that Maxim only married her out of loneliness. Above all, the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) seems to hate her, because she adored Rebecca and resents anyone taking her place. Just before we join the extract, the heroine has had a particularly upsetting encounter with Mrs Danvers who has shown her Rebecca\u2019s room in the West Wing and all of Rebecca\u2019s elegant clothes and ornaments in a way that underlines the heroine\u2019s feelings of inadequacy and inferiority in such a setting. She has run out of the room, crying- but now decides it\u2019s time to assert her authority and behave in the manner expected of the new Mrs de Winter, mistress of Manderley. What better way than to organise one of those grand costume balls that Manderley was famous for?
\n