Rebecca

 

Brilliant psychological drama movie from Alfred Hitchcock "Rebecca" (1940) starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) accidentally meets the beautiful Joan Fontaine when he is rather contemplating jumping down a cliff in Monte Carlo. One thing leads to another and soon both are romantically involved. She then becomes his second wife after his first wife Rebecca accidently drowns herself off the sea coast. Rebecca is never shown in the movie, but her imprint is throughout the movie. Her faithful housekeeper Mrs. Denvers is rather too faithful to her memories and seems to be of the devilish and plotting kind. She was too close to Rebecca and adored her too much to bear her loss too badly. Hitchcock twists the plot towards the end to first implicate Maxim with her murder and then it goes around to another tale of her sickness, or probably that she was pregnant or maybe she committed suicide or murder, the plot keeps swinging about till the end. Joan Fontaine as the girl who does not have a name in the movie looked beautiful throughout the movie and acted brilliantly as well.  Laurence Olivier is passable, The film won a clutch of awards for Alfred Hitchcock. 

The Stranger

 

1946 psycho drama film starring Orson Welles, Loretta Young and directed by Orson Welles himself. The film has dark shades as Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) a school teacher in Harper, Connecticut could possibly be an ex-Nazi criminal by the name of Franz Kindler. He is about to marry Mary (Loretta Young) the daughter of one of the judges of the US Supreme Court. UN War Commission is after Kindler who has left Germany without leaving any trace behind, save for one of his associates Meinike who is a prisoner in a Czechoslovakia prison. Meinike is released in the hope that he will try to contact Kindler and as expected he does go after him to Connecticut. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) who is heading the UN Commission goes after Meinike in order to prise out Kindler. Wilson plays the waiting game for Kindler to fall into his trap. Nice noir movie with Orson Welles playing a super role that of a hard core, unrepenting criminal, Loretta Young as the confused and disbelieving wife and Robinson as the cool and composed cop. The film was released in 1946 which means production must have taken place sometime in late 1945, when the war had just ended with the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombing in August 1945. Quite a brilliant effort for that era, when many movie goers must not yet have realised the depravity of the Nazi concentration camps.