SPOILERS AHEAD! Do not read if you haven't seen the movie!

Let's talk about the climactic scene in the boat house. It's when Maxim reveals to his wife exactly what happened the night of Rebecca's death.

First a question (for those who haven't read the book), did you believe Max's story?

Probably most of the audience did, and certainly the censors did. Max says it was an accident, that he "must've hit her or something... and she just smiled and came toward me... but fell and hit her head..."

That immediately jumped out at me as sort of sketchy. To be honest I thought it was rather flaky and at first thought it was a weak resolution. But then it occurred to me that we're supposed to think it's rather flaky. Who, in the heat of a furious argument, accidentally falls and dies?

I went back to the book. Sure enough, the book is pretty clear that it was no accident. Max killed her. Then I dove into the details of the filmmaking process and who decided to change the story to make it an 'accident'. Sure enough, those American censors of 1940 wouldn't stand for something as immoral as the killer getting away with it. They knew how the book went, and they were watching Hitch/Selznick like hawks to see how they'd handle the ending.

Here's the brilliance on Hitch's part. Sure enough, he gives us the revision that it was an 'accident'. But notice how it's presented; we never actually see the events. Instead--conspicuously--the camera slowly moves around the empty room as Max recounts his story, but it doesn't actually show anything tangible. Only the implied presence of Rebecca. But with this device, I think Hitch was very clear: We are not witnessing objective truth. We are hearing one man's subjective reality. What really happened is totally up in the air.

If you're familiar with Kurosawa's landmark "Rashomon" which really drove the point home about narrators and their subjective realities clashing with truth, you probably see this same groundbreaking theme here in Rebecca. Except Rebecca came 10 years before Rashomon. Did Hitch do this just to skirt the censors, or was this an artistic choice he would've done anyway? Either way, for me this is what bumps this great flick up to classic masterpiece.