THE MISTRESS OF SUSPENSE
Taking the lead of the film’s maker, the vast majority of critics writing about Phantom Thread have dutifully remarked upon the similarities between Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and Alfred Hitchcock’s first American picture Rebecca (1940), overlaying the triangle of dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), his young livein lover Alma (Vicky Krieps), and Woodcock’s imperious sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) over that of brooding aristocrat Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), his naive second wife (Joan Fontaine), and the demonic housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), whose mad devotion to Maxim’s dead first wife Rebecca leads her to try and drive the new Mrs. de Winter to suicide. But while Anderson’s openly invited comparison has predictably inspired musings on the film’s greater or lesser Hitchcockianness—particularly as the plot comes to turn upon a slight case of domestic poisoning, which also parallels the Master of Suspense’s Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946)—perhaps we would do better to trace Phantom Thread further back, to its true genesis: Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of Rebecca, which Hitchcock adapted with a fidelity that was truly unusual for him.
Given that Hitchcock is the most studied filmmaker in the medium’s history, it’s remarkable that even knowing all we do about the extent of his collaborations—with his wife and frequently uncredited scenarist Alma.) It’s thus fascinating, in sifting through the correspondence between Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick about (contained in the Selznick papers housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas), to see the power imbalance between the filmmaker and the author of the film’s source novel. What we see in these memos is Hitchcock’s initial attempt to efface du Maurier’s influence from the film as much as possible, and ultimate concession to the author’s narrative design. Yet although is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a literary source that Hitchcock ever made, it also contains the seeds of much of what we would come to think of as “Hitchcock”—themes, motifs, and obsessions that also run throughout the work of du Maurier, who, like Hitchcock, spent the majority of her career being dismissed as a popular entertainer rather than an artist.
