Hitchcock's first American film is a superbly polished adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's story of a timid, nameless bride (Joan Fontaine) whose brooding husband Maxim (Laurence Olivier) and demonic housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), live in the mansion Manderly overshadowed by an obsessive attachment to the dead “first Mrs. De Winter,” Rebecca. The ghostly, lyrical voice that ushers us into this story, that of a self-possessed, cultivated, all-knowing being, seems like it must belong to Rebecca as well, for it bears little resemblance to the gawky girl who stammers and blurts her way into a most unexpected marriage. Indeed, unable to get through to the Heathcliffian Maxim, Fontaine's character speaks less and less freely in her new home, in a profoundly radical failure to perform as a wife. As this gothic melodrama shifts subtly into a murder mystery, the girl becomes a woman who has finally laid claim to her power, to herself, and, retrospectively, to the voice that speaks with such tender nostalgia for Manderly, “where we can never go back.”