YMMV / Rebecca (1940)

• Award Snub:
  • The film version won the Best Picture Oscar, the only Alfred Hitchcock film to do so, but it only garnered one other win (George Barnes for cinematography) out of 11 total nominations. Hitchcock's Best Director loss to John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath was perfectly understandable, since it was another cinematic giant directing a classic, but odds are Hitchcock probably didn't have much of a chance anyway. At that point, producers were largely viewed as the auteurs of film, and David O. Selznick had an outsized reputation for wielding creative control on his films. Hitchcock, as an outsider making his first Hollywood film, would've been seen as merely a hired hand for Selznick. In fact, while Selznick and Hitchcock clashed a lot in pre-production, Selznick mostly left Hitchcock alone on the set, since he was burned out from Gone with the Wind's Troubled Production, including coming to blows with the original director George Cukor and supervising Victor Fleming and production designer William Cameron Menzies as they took over directorial duties.
  • Similarly, in the Best Supporting Actress category, Judith Anderson's iconic performance as Mrs. Danvers had the bad luck to go up against another iconic performance, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad.
• Broken Base: Vivien Leigh's screen test for the second Mrs De Winter is now available on YouTube, and people are split into two camps - those who agreed with Alfred Hitchcock that she was 'too strong', and Joan Fontaine's natural naivety and anxiety was the correct fit for the heroine. Others however, thinks "Hitchcock made a mistake".
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Maxim is revealed to have been in an emotionally abusive relationship with Rebecca. His actor Laurence Olivier would experience a strained marriage with Vivien Leigh - where her mental health problems led to her having an affair similar to the one Rebecca had with Favell. Although by his own account, their divorce was more amicable.
  • The second Mrs de Winter has no family and feels constantly out of place among Maxim's high society circle, as well as comparing herself to the late Rebecca. It's rather prescient of her actress Joan Fontaine, who was considered The Unfavorite of her family in comparison to her more beloved older sister - to the degree that she wasn't allowed to use the family surname when she became an actress too. The feud between the sisters lasted all their lives.
• One-Scene Wonder: Alfred Hitchcock fave Leo G. Carroll as Dr. Baker, the 11th-Hour Ranger who discloses a crucial piece of information about Rebecca that blows the plot wide open.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: After the opening monologue about Manderley, we spend the first 30 minutes of the film in Monte Carlo before the de Winters finally get to the mansion. In contrast, in the novel the Monte Carlo sequence only takes up 5 out of 27 chapters, and the narrator still talks about Manderley in them.