Imaptience/Rebecca #4

Maxim displays impatience (illustration friday prompt) with the narrator when she wears a costume identical to that of the previous Mrs. DeWinter. This is the quotidian woman's fear of wearing the same outfit as another woman blown up to operatic proportions. In the novel, the heroine completes her passage into Real Woman hood by becoming complicit in concealing the fact that her husband is a murderer - in the movie, it softened, so that the Rebecca just kind of bumped her head when she fell over. I have another rumination for Saturday, Sunday...hmmm. The Third Man starts on Monday.

Rebecca #3

Mrs. Danvers forces the narrator to listen to her obsessive rant about the first Mrs. DeWinter. The performance of Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers seems to me exactly the performance that an Egyptian sphinx,  inserted into domestic service, would give - stony, unknowable, implacable.

Rebecca #2

My story begins in the South of France...

I wish, ha, it's actually Lake Merritt in Oakland. Return with me to the romantic days of yesteryear, when if a man told a woman she was "A little fool" it meant he thought she was, you know, kind of hot. In this scene, the unnamed narrator stops Maxim DeWinter, played in dry-stick like fashion by Laurence Olivier, from taking a header off a cliff. He does not appear to be thankful.

Rebecca # 1

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again...Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, and suddenly it seemed as if light came from those windows. And then a cloud came upon the moon, and hovered for an instant like a dark hand before a face. And the illusion went with it.

     - from the script for Rebecca

Finding photo opportunities at the Antiques Centre is like shooting fish in a barrel. These weren't among the scenes I was going to shoot, but they seemed perfect. I will be posting more news of Alice later today, I missed doing so on Sunday. There were some wonderfully creative responses to yeterday's "Last Night I dreamed" after the identification, so I'm thinking of having a feature where I illustrate a narrative from the comments section. Must take a walk to figure out how this will work.