Actually, Rebecca, to anyone who has read Daphne du Maurier's novel, is a great disappointment. Not Hitch's fault, but the wretched requirements of that idiotic Hays' Code which applied at the time. In the book, it turns out that Maxim de Winter had actually murdered the obnoxious Rebecca, with whose memory the second Mrs de W thought she had to compete. But that was not possible in 1940 under the Code, according to which "all criminality had to be punished", and the plot had accordingly to be fudged so that her death was an accident; which of course had the effect of robbing that sardonic narrative of its point.

~M~