Rebecca on Netflix- SPOILERS

[BitOfFun]

Please don't read on if you haven't seen it!

I am a huge fan of the book and the Hitchcock film, but I actually like the changes that have been made in this version.

I'm posting to ask about something I just don't understand though.

When they are in the boathouse with the gun, why would she do what he was urging? I don't get it.

Oh, and why does the murmuration of starlings (shown twice) spell S?

Seeing it later today in a cinema. I read that this version follows the book's ending- but it's so long ago since I read it I can't remember it. I'll post back if I get the answer

Dido, you naughty thing! Wait until you've watched it before opening a spoiler thread! .

By that point he’s put her through hell and he’s been through hell, and she knows he’s a killer, I wonder if she considered it merciful to him and to her but couldn’t quite do it because of love

I wasn’t sure about the murmuration either. They really seemed to focus on it didn’t they. I suppose an “R” would have been too unrealistic

Well, I guess they got away with 'Surrender Dorothy" in The Wizard Of Oz .

@Didkdt

By that point he’s put her through hell and he’s been through hell, and she knows he’s a killer, I wonder if she considered it merciful to him and to her but couldn’t quite do it because of love

Added to this pull the trigger and you’ll be free, he has put her in his position. But she doesn’t want to be free of him, he is her everything, she has nothing and no one else, not even his child and she loves him.

Oooh, I've been dying to chat about this. So, I have a completely different reaction to what I was expecting.
Loved this book as a kid, as a 40 year old woman, thought the adaptation fantastic but FFS, am MAHOOSIVELY on Rebecca's side this time.

The old 'she made me do it' trope is so annoying now, and the protagonist is just a massive apologist for her murderous husband who couldn't entertain his wife or bear her resulting infidelity.

Anyone else?

@HappyInL0nd0n

Oooh, I've been dying to chat about this. So, I have a completely different reaction to what I was expecting. Loved this book as a kid, as a 40 year old woman, thought the adaptation fantastic but FFS, am MAHOOSIVELY on Rebecca's side this time.

The old 'she made me do it' trope is so annoying now, and the protagonist is just a massive apologist for her murderous husband who couldn't entertain his wife or bear her resulting infidelity.

Anyone else?

I agree. I've changed to being on Rebecca's side over the years.

It's a bit like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as a teenager/ young woman you think Anna and Emma are these wild, reckless, free spirits tied to such dull men. Then you grow up and have your own children and think what a pair of selfish, spoilt brats they were.

I enjoyed it - also love the book and the older film.

Was the murmuration meant to be a letter? I must have missed that (my eyesight is terrible without my glasses).

My only criticism would be that they spent far too long on the opening bit and far too little time on the 2nd half. I didn't look at the clock but it felt like almost an hour before things had really started to get going at Manderley and the last hour was all the revelations.

Ah, see, I enjoyed that they spent so much time on their "love story", which was almost entirely absent from the book and earlier versions.

What did you all make of the ending? Have they been cursed by Danvers, or are they truly happy?

I’ve only watched as far as the first morning at Manderley, but the writers seem to have misread lots of the novel, or got period details wrong — why is Mrs Van Hopper apparently English? Why have they made Max and the heroine actually have a romance before he asks her to marry him? The whole point of the novel was that he’d treated her like a small child he was taking out up till and including the proposal, so that she genuinely thought he was offering her a job, not marriage?

And a staid English aristocrat is really not going to pick up his brand-new wife, throw her over his shoulder and carry her up the steps between rows of stony-faced servants? And I love Kristen Scott Thomas, but a housekeeper in an English country house in 1935 would really not be slinking about in red lipstick and telling the new mistress of the house that she thought she’d been a lady’s maid! The significant class distinction between the heroine’s impoverished but genteel status and that of the ‘servant class’ would have been entirely obvious to everyone.

I agree with much of what you have (very entertainingly!) said, Camogue, apart from Mrs Van Hopper being English. She is definitely American, but with the affected mid-Atlantic accent of the East Coast upper class, à la Grace Kelly etc.

I'd explain the rest of it by assuming it's all part of the general 'updating for a modern audience' stuff. I've no problem with the changes for this reason, especially if it does encourage a new generation to encounter the book.

@DidoLamenting

In other versions of Rebecca (Hitchcock) her death was revealed as accidental rather than murder.

This ending remains true to the book in that Maxim essentially gets away with murder.

All because of the Hays (ethical) film code. In essence you were not allowed to portray someone getting away with murder.

Also the ending in this version is far more embellished than the book in that it shows who burns the house down rather than hints at it.

I thought the murmuration was a lock of dark hair rather than a letter

Du Maurier wasn't a romance writer and apparently hated being thought of us as one which is probably why she didn't focus on their romance, but there would had to have been a reason why Maxim was able to get away with murder and it was because he was loved rather than that his wife was wet. A wet person wouldn't have the strength of character to go up against the law. So I think this version shows that really well.

There is a hint at the end that they aren't truly happy as they travel the world searching for a new home. Home was very important to Maxim Manderly was part of his very core.

Ah, the lock of hair interpretation really makes sense, thank you!

The ending is rather ambiguous, isn't it? To me, it looked like she was trying to create happiness by swapping her previous naivety for a more worldly and hedonistic attitude. We know that Maxim misses her "funny lost look" , but the question for me is whether the change in her represents compromising her moral integrity, or if she has simply grown up and become her own woman.

@BitOfFun my thoughts exactly. He fell in love with a girl due to her differences to a cynical wife.

But the new grown up wife isn’t cynical, She had to grow up because she loved him and wanted to save him, he moulded the girl into the woman, the first MRS D-W was already grown up and out in the world when they met

Watched this last night. One of my favourite books though I haven’t read it for many years and was a bit sketchy on a few details

Anyway my gripe, if I have one, is that the ending seemed a bit too happy, the book left me feeling like their life together was half mirage and compromise and that they - or at least the second Mrs DW could never be truly happy, the truth was too big.

The age gap wasn’t obvious enough either but I can accept that as being more appropriate for audiences I guess.

But oh god I loved all the clothes and the setting even if slightly jarring with the period. I want Mrs DW hats and jumpers and dresses. And I want her hair and brows pls.

I thought I had seen the Hitchcick film but realised I didn't know how it ended. I think I found it so tedious I gave up. I liked this film and its interesting that it ended the same as the book and not the earlier film.

The only reason the Hitchcock version couldn’t follow the novel in the major plot point of how Rebecca died was because of the Hays Code, which (as well as banning the depiction of any form of sexuality considered ‘deviant’, including extramarital sex presented positively) meant you could not create audience sympathy for someone who breaks the law, or depict someone getting away with committing a crime. It removes all the darkness from the second part of the novel.

There is a hint at the end that they aren't truly happy as they travel the world searching for a new home

I thought it was more than a hint. The 2nd Mrs de W looked raddled in that final scene, sitting at her dressing table smoking, hair a mess. She would never have smoked before. It looked to me that all her freshness and innocence had gone.

Oh, the clothes ! I loved the Liberty print blouse and jim jams, and her dresses and even her trousers (don't usually like trousers) Mrs D's suits were gorgeous too.

Arnie Hammer is a plank of wood- a very pretty plank, but solid wood.

I think she'd be happier being more jaded less naieve or gauche as she says in the book.
Smoking wasn't considered so bad back then as well and the bed head could have been after passionate marital relations. Although I admit in the book you get the sense that Maxim is left with some form of PTSD and that's awfully hard for anyone to live with

Ah another Rebecca thread. I mean that positively. I really enjoyed and viewed it separately to the book. My only ‘problem’ was the 2nd Mrs DW gathering the evidence on her own with Maxim in a prison cell. I thought the book presented this so much better. I also preferred the implication of Danvers burning down the house.

Overall though I enjoyed it and can see myself sitting down on a bored afternoon with not much to do and watching it again.

Danvers burned down the house after Favell told her everything.