Earl Grey Books

This is my first post for my Rebecca readalong and I am so excited for the ones I have planned, so please stay tuned! But for today, I decided to peruse the internet for some movie recommendations for Rebecca lookalikes and gave them a watch. Let’s talk about what I watched!

Dial M For Murder

What better to compare to Hitchcock’s adaptation than another movie of his? I have to be honest and admit that this is only the second of his that I’ve watched (the other being Rebecca). Even though Hitchcock was kind of a dick about du Maurier, allegedly dismissing her as belonging to ‘a whole school of feminine literature’ (as quoted in Frayling’s preface of The Daphne du Maurier Companion), he does have a way of creating atmosphere like no one else. Who else is great at creating atmosphere? You guessed it—it’s du Maurier. No matter what they might have thought of each other, it’s pretty clear that they were both masters of their craft. I enjoyed this one—there are some strange moments narrative-wise, but as a whole, I like movies (and books) like this where the story takes place in one set location. If anyone has any recommendations for those, please send them my way!

Laura

I won’t lie, this one was kind of strange. It seems pretty straight-forward in terms of its plot and characters, but at the same time, it’s strange. But when it started off, it was reminding me a lot of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, or at least the first few chapters (which is all I’ve read so far). Obviously, this was released in 1944, and the book in 2000, but for a moment I felt like I was getting sucked into that story. As far as I know, the only things they have in common are the protagonists both named Laura who are dead. I don’t know, I just couldn’t shake that feeling. Otherwise, this was honestly okay. There’s something a little uncomfortable about a detective falling in love with the woman whose murder he is investigating, but hey, why not? Would I watch this again? Probably not, but it was worth the chance.

Spellbound

Here’s the thing: I didn’t make it through this one at all. It sounded interesting when I picked out as one to watch from all the different recommendation lists I found. And I loved Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday—it’s one of my all-time favourite movies. But going into this, I literally saw the words ‘psychoanalysis’ come up on the screen and cringed. I still tried to keep going even though I was kind of feeling uncomfortable. I think we can all agree that the treatment of mental health in the 40s when this was made left a lot to be desired. Besides that, I think I made it to the 25-minute mark before I realised it had taken me an hour to get that far—I just kept pausing to do other things. Maybe I’ll give this another chance further down the road, but until then I’m calling it here.

And that’s all of them! I had been hoping to watch a few more, but ran out of time. Either way, have you seen any of these? Do you have any Rebecca-like movies you’d recommend?