Hitchcock's first American film is a superbly polished adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's story of a young bride (Joan Fontaine) whose marriage is haunted by the spirit of her husband's first wife, Rebecca, to whom the brooding bridegroom (Laurence Olivier) and his demonic housekeeper (Judith Anderson) are obsessively attached. What begins as something of a ghost story develops rather late into a murder mystery and finally into what it has been all along, a psychological thriller. At the center is Olivier's sado-masochistic love-hatred of his wife-both of them.