Rebecca/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Maxim a villain, hero or anti-hero? Is everything Maxim says about Rebecca true? Do Maxim and the 2nd Mrs deWinter get a happy ending or not? All open to interpretation.
  • Award Snub: The film is one of the few films which won the Best Picture Oscar without the film's director also winning Best Director. Presumably this was because Hitchcock was a relative unknown in the US at the time, or because the film's producer David O. Selznick had a reputation for having a high degree of creative control over the films he produced, often essentially directing the films himself.
  • Freud Was Right: It's a Hitchcock film, what did you expect?
  • Fridge Logic: The new Mrs. De Winter's response to learning Maxim De Winter killed Rebecca? "He never loved her -- so he loves ME!" and she then agrees to help him cover up Rebecca's murder.
    • It was suggested elsewhere that Rebecca was just as much of a bitch as Maxim says she is. Beatrice walks on eggshells on the topic because she knew that Rebecca seduced her husband, Mrs. Danvers openly talks about how Rebecca took advantage of men and laughed about it, and the end makes it pretty clear that she was pushing Maxim's buttons for him to shoot her. Granted, the second Mrs. de Winter didn't know that last bit when Maxim confessed to the murder, but then most of her issues stemmed from Mrs. Danvers saying over and over "Oh, you're just someone pathetic that Maxim felt sorry for; he still loves Rebecca."
  • Les Yay: Implied (much more heavily in the book) to be a major component of Mrs. Danvers' devotion to Rebecca.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Rebecca.