When I found out that Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier had been made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, I had to check it out. Apparently it won the 1940 Academy Ward for Best Picture. It stars Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs. de Winter and Laurence Olivier as Max de Winter. While looking up details about the movie, I found out that Laurence Olivier also starred as Heathcliff in a 1939 version of Wuthering Heights. Looks like I have another old movie to check out. But I digress.
I liked the movie adaptation of Rebecca. There were many lines taken straight from the book, but it was obviously edited heavily for time's sake. You just can't get a 400 page novel into two hours. Since I felt that some of the middle of the novel was too slow, I liked that. If you like old movies, you'll probably like this one and I recommend it.
***Spoiler Alert***
The biggest changes to the movie made it more palatable for general audiences. Though the narrator loves Maxim no matter that he killed his first wife, it's still hard to swallow as an outsider, even when played by Laurence Olivier. So the movie version had Rebecca's death be an accident with Maxim there and no one would believe him that it was an accident, blah, blah, blah. Easier to forgive an accident than murder though. And the ending was much more dramatic and direct than the book was.
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