The film of the day: Jane Eyre 1944

The release by Fox Home Entertainment of the restored 1944 Jane Eyre Hollywood version (check our competition) is reported today in The New York Times (see other reviews here):

Without Orson Welles, Twentieth Century Fox’s 1944 version of “Jane Eyre” would probably join the other literary adaptations Fox is releasing on DVD this week — “Anna Karenina” (1948), and a double bill of the 1935 and 1952 versions of “Les Misérables” — somewhere on a back shelf in high school libraries, to be shown whenever an English teacher feels like taking an afternoon off.
But with Welles as the stormy Mr. Rochester, this movie becomes something different: something suffused with his personality and legend. Although this “Jane Eyre” is signed by the director Robert Stevenson, and Welles never made any authorial claims to it, generations of Welles scholars have found his fingerprints all over the film. Mr. Stevenson was a competent and at times superior craftsman, but the forced perspectives, exaggerated camera angles and meticulous attention to sound cannot be found in many of his other movies, like “Mary Poppins” (1964), to cite but one perhaps unfair example.
By the time Welles appeared in this film, he had already adapted this Brontë novel twice for radio: in 1938 for “The Mercury Theater on the Air” and in 1940 for “The Campbell Playhouse.” (Only the Campbell version survives.) And the screenplay, attributed to John Houseman, Aldous Huxley and Mr. Stevenson, is structured like a radio program, with a central narrator — Joan Fontaine as Jane — reading long expository passages from the book and actors stepping in to interpret crucial scenes.
Add to that a score by Welles’s regular collaborator Bernard Herrmann; a central set designed by the architect William Pereira that bears a powerful resemblance to Charles Foster Kane’s digs; and the presence of Mercury players like Agnes Moorehead and Erskine Sanford, and the case for “Jane Eyre” as a Welles film in disguise seems all but closed.
Welles gave “Jane Eyre” everything, it seems, except his genius. His first Hollywood film after his RKO contract came to a calamitous end, it is the work of someone playing it safe and sitting on his best instincts. Ms. Fontaine, effortlessly able to enlist the audience’s deepest sympathy when working for Alfred Hitchcock (“Rebecca”) or Max Ophüls (“Letter From an Unknown Woman”), here seems merely meek and recessive. And who wouldn’t be, confronted by a Welles fitted out with elevator shoes and one of the worst rubber noses in his large collection?
As critics at the time pointed out, Welles seems to be playing Emily Brontë’s thundering Heathcliff rather than her sister Charlotte’s downtrodden Rochester, completely overpowering poor Jane. Mr. Stevenson — or Welles, or the cinematographer George Barnes, or whoever was calling the shots — tries to make it up to Ms. Fontaine by framing her in tight, tremulous close-ups, and much of the movie consists of her looking beseechingly into the camera, pleading for an understanding that never comes.
Still this well-produced disc has much to recommend it, including two world-class villains, played by Ms. Moorehead and the incomparably snide Henry Daniell, and a startling appearance by an unbilled, very young Elizabeth Taylor, her perfect adult face perched on a tiny body, as Jane’s one childhood friend.
There are two commentary tracks, one by Joseph McBride (a Welles biographer) and Margaret O’Brien, the former child star who appears in the film as Rochester’s coquettish ward, and another by the film historians Nick Redman, Steven Smith and Julie Kirgo. An isolated music track lets Mr. Herrmann’s string-based score, one of his most emotionally wide-ranging, stand on its own. (Dave Kehr)

And at the other side of the pond, Channel Four airs the film today (see our sidebar). The Times chooses it as The Film of the day:

Film of the day
Jane Eyre (1944, b/w), Channel 4, 12.40pm
Charlotte Brontë’s classic 19th-century novel about the tempestuous romance between two emotionally scarred lovers has been adapted for the screen a dozen times, but this atmospheric version still ranks among the best. It was directed by Robert Stevenson with a little uncredited help from his male lead, Orson Welles. Joan Fontaine plays the eponymous heroine, an orphan who becomes a governess at the grand estate where she falls for her ill-tempered employer, Rochester. Played with a slightly deranged edge by Welles ( right), the sullen and remote Rochester may be an unlikely romantic hero, but he is tormented by ghosts from the past that eventually prove to be his undoing. Co-starring a young Elizabeth Taylor in one of her earliest roles, Jane Eyre was the only feature script credited to the actor John Houseman, whose long list of screen appearances include Three Days of the Condor and Scrooged. The British-born Stevenson later became a Disney regular, with Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks among his credits. Fontaine had played a similar role, as a neurotic second wife trapped in a lonely mansion, in Hitchcock’s Rebecca four years earlier. (97min) (Stephen Dalton)

Another adaptation of Jane Eyre, the latest one, is again on the news. Variety reports:

BBC Worldwide, the Blighty pubcaster's commercial arm, has announced its first global clips deal with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV and a major content deal with Aussie pubcaster the ABC. (Steve Clarke)

And finally, another adaptation, the 1973 BBC one, is briefly discussed on this post aptly titled Jane Eyre Fevah!

Categories: In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV