Weekend Loew's Report: 'The Uninvited' and 'Rebecca'

The Uninvited (1944) and Rebecca (1940)

A double feature of 1940s suspensers on Saturday night at the The Landmark Loew's Jersey Theatre. I think of these as "women's pictures" (a popular 40s genre), because in each the character the audience is supposed to care about is a damsel in distress, either literally (The Uninvited) or emotionally (Rebecca).

The Univited is a haunted house/ghost story that seems tame and hokey by today's standards. Rebecca, the first American project by Hitchcock, is a much better film and features a far stronger cast (Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier), but it also creaks in a "they don't make 'em like that anymore" way. There's excellent acting and moments of both genuine eeriness and humor in both, but for me, the most interesting thing about watching Hollywood films from this repressed and heavily censored era is to look for subtexts. And both of these films have a strong -- brace yourself -- lesbian subtext!

Hitchcock was a well-known perv and obsessive, and his Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) character in Rebecca, with her maniacal obsession, to the point of both worship and suicide, with her deceased employer (Rebecca) is what fuels the suspense in the latter half of the film. Similarly, in The Univited, a creepy insane asylum administrator is homicidally obsessed with a "beautiful" dead woman, a woman she's named her establishment for.

You have to wonder what audiences at the time these films were released thought about all this. Was what seems obvious now completely missed back then? I'm guessing not. But nobody talked about it. You can easily imagine Hitchcock winking, though.