Hitchcock's first American film was a superbly polished adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's story of a timid bride (Joan Fontaine) whose brooding husband (Laurence Olivier) and demonic housekeeper (Judith Anderson) are obsessively attached to wife number one, Rebecca. What begins as a ghost story develops rather late into a murder mystery. But the film comes into its own as a psychological thriller about a living nonentity who must wrest her claim to a personality from a ghost; and about the man who in the end gives her the power to damn or redeem him.