There's also the fact that James spends most of the film on the perpetual verge of tears, while Hammer can't seem to muster Maxim's vaunted rage, which is so frequently referenced in the script, but never manages to make it to the screen.

Hitchcock's opening shot tracks along the twisting and turning front drive of Manderley until the massive house finally comes into view — a sprawling, gloomy vision haunted by memory and regret. It's breathtaking.

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Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) is forbidding, foreboding and fierce — easily the best thing about Netflix's Rebecca remake. Kerry Brown/Netflix hide caption

If you go into this Netflix retread with nothing to compare it to, it'll go down easy enough. It's pretty to look at — the French Riviera of the film's opening act is colorful and sunny, and the Cornish cliffs of its conclusion are dramatic and thrilling.

There's a type of tool that works on pretty much anything: diamond. It's very hard, therefore very brittle, so the whole tool is not made of diamond. Instead, diamond dust is deposited on the edge. It abrades off material, pretty much like sandpaper.

It is absolutely possible to drill concrete without using tungsten carbide. People carved stone for centuries with bronze or steel chisels and a hammer. But these tools get blunt quickly. Carbide just lasts a lot longer.

But what's most mystifying is how thoroughly Wheatley's film seems to have misread the ostensible "romance" between James' character and Hammer's Maxim. In both the novel and the 1940 film, there is a great, yawning distance between the second Mrs. de Winter and her husband — he is much older, sneeringly condescending, and even cruel, where she is fearful, unsure and subservient. Theirs is less a relationship than a pathology, but the Netflix film envisions it as a romance that is destined to be happy, once all those pesky long-buried secrets come to light. Not only does it supply James' character with a final triumphant moment in her conflict with Danvers (galling! sacrilege!), it tacks on an ending which completely refutes the story's central, intriguing darkness.

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Which makes sense, as it was carefully designed to be. It was a painstakingly wrought miniature, engineered to impress ... and unsettle.

Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) is forbidding, foreboding and fierce — easily the best thing about Netflix's Rebecca remake.

Instead it looks ... like a big house, basically. And instead of thrilling to the mysteries housed within its leering windows and crumbling masonry, you find yourself idly wondering what the guy's paying for groundskeeping.

There is, however, one way that the Netflix version surpasses Hitchcock's, and it's entirely due to the 80 years' worth of developments in cinematic technology that stretch between the two films. Hitchcock shot his film almost entirely on Hollywood soundstages, so many exterior scenes look hilarious today. Again and again, he had his actors declaim their lines or "drive" a car in front of rear-projections that hurt the eyes.

Drill bits for metal use sharp edges to cut chips. If the bit is well sharpened, you can get nice continuous chips. The bit material has to be harder than the workpiece in order to cut it, and it also has to hold an edge. However, harder materials tend to be more brittle, which means the higher quality bits cut better but are also easy to break if you're not careful.

(Side note: The filmmakers of the Netflix version maintain they are simply re-adapting ... and updating ... the novel, and pointedly not attempting to remake Hitchcock — but as they've preserved several of the alterations he made to the story, that assertion has more holes in it than the title character's doomed sailboat. But we'll come to that.)

So a diamond core drill will make holes into pretty much anything, but it is a very slow process and it makes a lot of heat, so it needs to be water cooled... not the most practical when you want to hang a picture frame. It will also make holes through tile without fracturing it, which is nice.

Let's acknowledge: It is wildly unfair to compare this knock-off to Hitchcock's iconic classic, which, not for nothing, won the Academy Award for best picture. But it's also inevitable, because what the filmmakers have produced is not a fresh reimagining, but a dully dutiful remake.

Our narrator is actually the second Mrs. de Winter — the first, named Rebecca, was a fabulous and charming beauty, beloved by all — including Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas), Manderley's chief housekeeper. James' character is made to feel like an interloper, both by Danvers and by an increasingly distant Maxim. The immense estate and her new duties gradually overwhelm her as Danvers works to undermine her authority and her sanity, until a horrible discovery is made, involving a scuttled sailboat.

That scene isn't doing the work it's meant to, but you know who is? Kristin Scott Thomas, is who. Her Danvers isn't nearly as outsized as Anderson's, but her choices are just as smart and specific. It must be said, however, that by starting the film in such a relatively grounded place, the journey Thomas is tasked with taking proves a much longer walk than Anderson's was, as the 1940 Danvers was pretty clearly off, from the jump. When 2020 Danvers goes round that final bend, I wasn't necessarily on board with her.

Many metal-drilling bits are marginal for steel anyway - OK if you can get the job done fast, but if you're doing enough that they heat up, they'll blunt quickly. These are often used on wood and plastic as well. For small holes in brick, mortar, and plaster (softer building materials), an old metal drill bit will actually work quite well, without hammer action - but it will get even blunter fast.

Drywall is pretty soft, and it's possible to drill it with steel bits easily. However it contains very hard particles which will abrade off the cutting edge, so that drill bit will no longer cut steel.

Hardness is a different story; I had to look at several sites to find comparisons. Mohs in the hardness scale for minerals. But in many decades of hardness testing of metals , I have never seen Mohs used for steel . But it is on the net. Very brief summary: cold rolled ( most common steel) is Mohs 4 ( most other metals and stainless will be lower). Steel knife blade is Mohs 6. Sand/quartz is Mohs 7. Limestone ( common concrete aggregate ) is Mohs 4. So in very general terms the hardness of concrete and cold rolled steel are about the same ( Mohs 4).

If you haven't read or seen the tale before, here are the basics: Our unnamed, unassuming, inexperienced narrator (Lily James) meets the dashing British aristocrat Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) while she's working as an assistant to an insufferably imperious lady (Ann Dowd) in Monte Carlo. There's a whirlwind sort-of-romance, and Maxim proposes, taking her back to Manderley, his massive estate in Cornwall.

Bits designed for hammer-action on masonry are shaped differently. This is the main mode of drilling, where the tip bashes material from the bulk, and the flutes transport it out of the hole. In contrast cutting metal (or wood, or plastic) you're actually cutting. One needs to be strong, and is tapered to concentrate force, the other needs to be sharp. You'll see a similar difference between a cold chisel and a woodworking chisel.

The same opening shot, in Wheatley's film, tracks up a (much, much longer) drive, only to end up at a house, a real house, that carries none of the sinister magic and menace of Hitchcock's Manderley.

I have found that there are two different type of drill bits for the concrete/bricks and metal. Metal is so much harder than concrete and bricks. Therefore, from logic I would expect that the drill bit used to cut metal will have an easier time drilling into the wall. However, I have found that this is not recommended. In other words, only the masonry bit should be used for masonry. I have been told that using the metal drilling bit for masonry will actually damage the bit overtime or cause faster wear.

Wheatley shot his exteriors on location, with a bit of CGI goosing here or there, and the visual result is satisfyingly grand and sweeping, mostly.

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The new Netflix film, on the other hand, is anti-... all of that. Anti-subtext, anti-horny, anti-swoon — at least in the performances, which are dialed back in a manner that renders them more realistic, yet far less interesting. Instead, the film shunts off all of its swooniness to its direction, using dream sequences filled with overwrought special effects to establish James' character's disorientation. Where Hitchcock used simple shadow and light to drive home Fontaine's alienation and isolation, director Ben Wheatley stages a ham-fisted scene at a masquerade ball to literalize James' character's mental breakdown.

The amount of enjoyment you get out of Netflix's wan remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 swooning gothic romance Rebecca depends entirely on how familiar you are with that original film, and the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier from which it was adapted.

But it's not the bulk you're interested in - it's the worst case components of that bulk. The aggregates in concrete can be really rather hard, and are more abrasive than the smooth surface you get in steel.

Concrete is made of sand, rocks, fine particles, and rebar held together by cement. You can't cut chips out of a rock with a cutting edge, but you can break off chips by hammering it. So to drill it, the bit has to pound it until it breaks, then crush the pieces into dust that will evacuate through the flutes. So the optimum bit for concrete is a soft steel shank (so it's not brittle, because it's gonna take a pounding) with something very hard, tough, and especially not brittle at the business end, for example tungsten carbide in a softer metal matrix. The shape doesn't need a cutting edge, it's more like a chisel.

Rock is crushed and scrapped; metals are cut. One bit type can not do both, generally. There is a range of harness and toughness in tungsten carbides so the carbide in a masonry bit is different from one in a steel cutting bit or a cutting tool in something like a lathe.

Exactly why is the metal drilling bit not suitable for drilling into masonry as well so we end up with two different types of drill bits?

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The thing that stays with you about the 1940 film is how enthusiastically it steers into the swoony gothic mystery of it all. "Swoony" being the key word here, because that's a polite, Hays-Code-appropriate way of saying "horny." Rebecca (1940) is a strikingly horny movie, filled with characters breathlessly panting after one another, and doing so in the slightly heightened, stylized, larger-than-life performance style of the era. There's the great Florence Bates as the narrator's employer, the perfectly named Edythe Van Hopper, a grand dame with a performative quaver in her voice that she can swap out on the fly for a low, appraising growl. There's the exquisitely cast George Sanders, so oily that just standing in his presence provides a full-day's dose of omega-3s, as Rebecca's cousin; in his brief screen time manages to prove both a cad, and a bounder.

I decided to re-watch the 1940 Hitchcock film the day before watching the Netflix version, which was, by any measure, a huge mistake.

And there is, of course, Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers, the performance that defines the movie. Anderson is unforgettable, largely because she appears to be doing so little while serving you so much — she remains unnervingly still, expressionless and unblinking from scene to scene, yet manages to radiate menace ... and subtext. (The scene in which Danvers gently strokes the narrator's (Joan Fontaine) cheek with the sleeve of a mink coat has single-handedly launched a thousand queer media studies theses.)

Some metals - you're most likely to encounter steel, especially stainless - are harder than (some) bulk concrete. Aluminium and copper are considerably softer.

There you go. And again, if this is your first visit to Manderley, it'll prove distracting enough for the COVID era. A little long, a little flabby in the middle maybe, but: Fine. Perfectly fine.