Anything might turn out to be important in a Hitchcock picture. Inanimate objects play roles as important as those of the major characters. In "Secret Agent" the object was a button; in "The Woman Alone," a roll of film; in "The Girl Was Young," a broken tea-cup, a pair of spectacles, a raincoat belt. And in "The Lady Vanishes" it was the label off a package of tea.
And so it goes. Hitchcock plants his clues with all the ingenuity with which Sherlock Holmes used to pick them up. He plays fair with his audience, but warns them to keep their eyes open and their ears, too. Else, the Hitchcock touch will land with the sharp impact of a rapier.
Also, say the scientific observers, beware of the Hitchcock characters. His greengrocers are police agents, his playboys are dángerous spies, his benign old ladies are adventurous criminals, his kindly householders are terrorists. Or, maybe not. Hitchcock may be crossing you. You will have it set in your mind that the sweet old lady is a foreign spy, then she will turn out to be a sweet old lady. Hitch is prankish that way. He'loves to tease.
On his methods of building suspense, for which he is so justly famous, the observers confess themselves at a loss. That is Hitchcock's Own secret, his own particular patent. On the surface the elements seem obvious enough. The audience sees and knows all, but remains spellbound, with something of tne awe of a rabbit hypnotized by a snake, with much of the helplessness of a witness to a tragedy which he cannot avert because the spectacle itself has left him: paralyzed.
While "Rebecca," which has been read by millions of people, supplied no spies, fascinating or other, it did give the famous director a new and neatly posed problem. The most mysterious element in his story is a woman who doesn't appear at all—a spectacularly beautiful woman who dominates the lives of more than a dozen people even though she is dead.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.