Rebecca

Rebecca (1940) is Alfred Hitchcock's gothic mystery you can watch online on iFILM. A shy, penniless girl whose name we never learn works as a paid companion to a loud American socialite in Monte Carlo. There she catches the eye of the widowed gentleman Maxim de Winter. A few weeks later she is the second Mrs. de Winter.

He takes her home to Manderley, the family estate on the cliffs of Cornwall. Yet his first wife is everywhere — Rebecca, drowned a year before under murky circumstances, lives on in every corridor, every monogrammed handkerchief, every sidelong look from the staff. Housekeeper Mrs. Danvers keeps the dead woman's bedroom like a shrine and treats the new bride as an impostor. Joan Fontaine plays the girl slowly erased by another's shadow, Laurence Olivier the husband whose silences hide something heavy, Judith Anderson the Danvers nobody forgets.

This was Hitchcock's first Hollywood picture and the only one of his films to take the Academy Award for Best Picture. The script grew out of Daphne du Maurier's novel, and the ghost the camera never shows turns out to be scarier than anything it could. Stream Rebecca (1940) online on iFILM.