My Cousin Rachel

Whether you find its ambiguity frustrating or glorious, Henry Koster’s My Cousin Rachel is an undeniably beautiful, atmospheric Gothic noir that hints, teases, and confounds through the never-quite-illuminated title character played by Olivia de Havilland. Based on a Daphne du Maurier novel and destined to be forever upstaged by that other du Maurier adaptation, Rebecca (1940), the film stars Richard Burton in his first U.S. film as Philip Ashley, a wealthy, orphaned boy raised in Cornwall by his cousin Ambrose (John Sutton). As an adult, Ambrose moves to Florence and marries their cousin Rachel, but, based on letters he writes home to Philip, it seems Ambrose’s new wife may be abusing him; indeed Philip rushes to Italy in time to hear of Ambrose’s death from a putative brain tumor. Philip suspects Rachel murdered him, but, upon their first encounter, immediately falls for her. The remainder of the film narrates Philip’s increasingly conflicted feelings, adoration battling with suspicion, while the script refuses to tip its hand definitively toward the cause of Ambrose’s death. Burton performs wonderfully opposite a character as enigmatic as Rachel, who, dressed in long black gowns and often holding a candle, is equal parts darkness and light, callous and tender. The star of the film, however, is the Gothic atmosphere luxuriously rendered through Waxman’s hard-working score and LaShelle’s gloomy cinematography, most notably in the fever dream sequence.