Rebecca [Blu-ray]

When Alfred Hitchcock decided he wanted to come to America to make films in order to utilize the greater facilities and larger pool of star talent, he signed on not with one of the Hollywood giants but with boutique studio David O. Selznick’s Selznick International. The contract was for five pictures over seven years, and while they originally talked about Titanic being his maiden voyage in American moviemaking, he went to work instead on Rebecca, a gothic romance with the kind of brooding melancholia and dark, whispered secrets which appealed to the master of suspense. While those who are more familiar with Rear Window or North by Northwest might blink twice at the choice of the movie for Hitchcock's first American film, another look at it proves that he brought enormous sensitivity and an immersive oppression to the film’s tone making it his only Oscar-winning Best Picture and firmly establishing himself as one of the directorial elite in this country for the rest of his career.

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