"Rebecca is a film about abusive relationships, and the way power might shift within them – and, most unusually, even for its time – its hero is the worst of the abusers. The romantic might view Laurence Olivier's as someone haunted by his past; the realist would see him as someone haunted only by his inability to control his past, specifically his titular deceased wife, and so he alights upon 's gauche, clumsy (and nameless) gentlewoman's companion as a wife who will give him no trouble. ... Rebecca was one of three films Hitchcock adapted from stories by Daphne du Maurier, and much the most successful. Du Maurier had been distressed by the liberties he took with ; ' suffered in being transformed from a perfect, ever-tightening noose of a short story set in Cornwall into an expansive movie set on the California coast. Rebeccas near fidelity is owed to , who was "shocked and disappointed beyond words" at Hitchcock's first treatment of the story and told the director: "We bought and we intend to make Rebecca.""