The relationship between producer David O. Selznick and director Alfred Hitchcock began with Rebecca. Both men were dynamic thinkers and bullheaded control freaks—it is amazing in retrospect that they managed to work together on four movies, which also included Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and The Paradine Case (1947). As film scholar Leonard J. Leff noted in his book Hitchcock and Selznick, “Hitchcock did not succeed despite Selznick any more than Selznick succeeded despite Hitchcock. The dynamics of the relationship served both men, not only as artists but—of equal importance to them—as Hollywood professionals.”

There is little doubt that Hitchcock would have eventually made it to Hollywood even if Selznick hadn’t signed him to a seven-year contract in 1938 (especially given the rapidly collapsing state of film production in England at the time owing to World War II). But, the fact that Selznick signed him first is testament to both the producer’s power and influence at the time and his thorough understanding of the movie industry in the 1930s and early ’40s. With the exception of Walt Disney, Selznick was the only successful independent producer of big-budget movies during the studio era prior to World War II, overseeing hits like A Star is Born (1937) and Gone With the Wind (1939).

Rebecca was, in many ways, more of a Selznick film—at least in its initial conception—than a Hitchcock film. This is something Hitchcock himself openly noted in his extensive interviews with François Truffaut: “it’s not a Hitchcock picture,” the director claimed, although one of his primary criteria for denying it that label is the fact that it is largely lacking in Hitch’s signature black humor (something he apparently tried and failed to insert against Selznick’s demand that almost anything remotely funny be removed from the film).

Produced with a large budget on elaborate sets and aimed at a primarily female audience, Rebecca would be a grand follow-up to Selznick’s romantic epic Gone With the Wind, which won the Best Picture Oscar the previous year. Yet, because Selznick was so busy with postproduction on Gone With the Wind while Hitchcock was shooting Rebecca in 1939, the director had a great deal of freedom to make the film his own way (although Selznick still maintained as close a watch as possible on the production and often demanded changes and urged Hitch to speed up his pace). Nevertheless, even if Hitchcock wouldn’t describe it as a “Hitchcock picture,” Rebecca is still filled with many Hitchcockian stylistic flourishes (elaborate crane shots, stylized shadows) and themes (the darkness beneath the veneer of everyday life, the none-too-subtle Freudian undertones that make the film so unnerving). He even managed to insert small touches of horror, such as the fact that we rarely see the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers walking anywhere; rather, she simply appears.

Rebecca has been widely noted as the initiator of the so-called “female Gothic” cycle of films in the early 1940s, which also included Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Similar in style, tone, and theme to film noir, the female Gothic cycle complicated notions of romance and gender that had previously been the rock-solid foundation of Hollywood romances; as Molly Haskell wrote about many films of the war era in From Reverence to Rape, “The trust that accompanied attraction is a thing of the past. Instead, relationships are rooted in fear and suspicion, impotence and inadequacy.”

This is a precise description of the marriage depicted in Rebecca. The film starts out in the south of France, where the unnamed narrator (Joan Fontaine in her first leading role) is working as a paid companion to a wealthy and obnoxious woman named Mrs. Van Hopper (Florence Bates). There, Fontaine meets a wealthy Englishman named Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who is brooding over the death of his first wife, Rebecca. Fontaine’s character and Maxim develop a relationship—I hesitate to say they fall in love, although it is clear she is infatuated with him—and decide to get married. Maxim takes her back to Manderley, his enormous, sprawling mansion in Cornwall, where she tries to fit into a life of privilege and wealth. Coming from a poor background with limited education and no pedigree, Fontaine’s character is immediately out of place, a situation that is abetted by Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), the mysterious—nay, nefarious—housekeeper who was so fond of Rebecca that she immediately despises Fontaine for even thinking of trying to take her place. In her mind, Rebecca, in life or death, is the only true “Mrs. de Winter,” and it is not much a stretch to read into Anderson’s performance both psychosis and sexual obsession.

In this sense, Rebecca is a perfect distillation of what film historian and scholar Robert Sklar described as the hallmark of film noir: “its sense of people trapped.” Fontaine is caught in a web not of her own making, and, because she is young, innocent, inexperienced, and without family, she has nothing to fall back on for protection. She is cut adrift, and shots of her diminished within the cavernous rooms and extensive hallways of Manderley become an apt visual metaphor for feelings of loss and alienation in what should be her “home.”

Maxim is a complex, nearly unreadable man—Olivier plays him perfectly, tender and gentle at times, but given to sudden violent outbursts and a complete refusal to deal with anything in his past, especially if it is related to Rebecca. Fontaine’s character gets the sense that Maxim has never stopped loving his first wife, thus she is caught in a predicament in which she is jealous of a woman who no longer exists. Rebecca is therefore all the more powerful because she lives only in people’s memories, traces of her everywhere, ensuring that she is never forgotten.

Rebecca was based on an extremely popular 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier, whose Jamaica Inn had already been adapted by Hitchcock for his last English film in 1939 and whose short story would be the basis for his 1963 film The Birds. Shot in heavily stylized black and white by George Barnes—the indebtedness to German expressionism is apparent in virtually every frame of his Oscar-winning cinematography—Rebecca is a dense, deeply textured emotional excursion, one that ultimately ensures that no easy answers are found. Even when the film turns into something of a conventional mystery in the last third—one that trades on the Hitchcockian twistedness of our hoping that someone gets away with a clearly criminal conspiracy—there is no sense that the emotional entanglements are anywhere closer to being resolved. That the film ends in a fiery denouement is all too fitting, forever sealing the impossibility of resolution despite a passionate embrace.

Rebecca was both a critical and commercial success, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. It is often said that Rebecca’s Oscar was the only one that Hitchcock ever won, but, as Hitch himself noted in his typically sardonic manner in one of the many memorable passages in his interviews with Truffaut, that is not true: