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Hitchcock himself dismissed his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as "novelettish". That’s an unnecessarily harsh judgement of a compelling film, which won the director his only Best Picture Oscar.

Produced by David Selznick, Rebecca is a delirious Gothic melodrama, swimming with queer undercurrents. Laurence Olivier plays brooding widower Max de Winter. Joan Fontaine plays his unnamed second wife, who discovers that life on de Winter’s imposing Cornish estate is dominated by memories of her deceased predecessor.

Foreshadowing Rear Window and Vertigo, the film digs deep into male anxieties about female sexual desire. Max deliberately chooses to replace Rebecca - who he confesses to having hated for her infidelities - with Fontaine’s girlish character. He treats her less as an adult partner than as an incompetent child. Lacking in "beauty, brains, and breeding", she becomes obsessed with Rebecca, dressing up in the latter’s exquisite clothes for a costume ball.

The title character is never seen, but she is described as a "beautiful creature" and is repeatedly associated with water. Her spirit haunts everything. The menacing housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) is certainly scarily devoted to her late mistress. "Danny" - note the male nickname - gets to caress one of Rebecca’s furs and fondle her underwear!

"DIGS INTO ANXIETIES OF FEMALE SEXUAL DESIRE"

Taking in Lyle Wheeler’s magnificent interior sets (they dwarf Fontaine’s timid character) and a wonderfully caddish turn from a blackmailing George Sanders, Rebecca sweeps the viewer along to an incendiary conclusion.