Jane Eyre **** (1943, Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Margaret O’Brien, Peggy Ann Garner, Henry Daniell, Agnes Moorehead) – Classic Movie Review 2670

Director Robert Stevenson’s 1943 movie is an impressively powerful and moody American version of the Charlotte Brontë classic about the Victorian orphan who becomes a governess in a strange Yorkshire household at Thornfield Hallruled over by a grim and brooding master. The film is maybe a little marred by Stevenson’s slightly sluggish handling but this is only a very minor problem. It is very likely that Brontë would have liked this version.

A dashing-looking and slimline-looking Orson Welles is the showstopper in a magnetic tour-de-force as a flamboyant and dangerously romantic Mr Rochester, and Joan Fontaine is just about right as an anything but plain Jane, the innocent heroine. She’s ideally cast and it is one of her best performances.

There’s a tasty gothic production by the 20th Century Fox studio, full of heady, swirling atmosphere, with lovely gothic black and white cinematography by George Barnes. It is entirely filmed in the studio in America, and as unreal as any Hammer horror film, complete with cardboard ‘Yorkshire’ moors.

Wiard B Ihnen and James Basevi’s production designs and Bernard Herrmann’s score are other notable triumphs. Stevenson, Aldous Huxley and John Houseman carve out a very decent, literate screenplay from the long novel, especially considering it’s been compressed into a 97 minute running time.

The start of the movie is less well remembered but just as successful, with Peggy Ann Garner as the young Jane, Henry Daniell as Mr Brocklehurst and Agnes Moorehead as Aunt Reed. It is already Elizabeth Taylor’s fourth film, at the age of 11, as Helen Burns, Jane’s friend with consumption.

All in all, it is not the perfect film of the novel, maybe, but still a very good one.

It was remade in 1996 with William Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Joan Plowright and Anna Paquin; in 1971 with George C Scott, Susannah York and Ian Bannen’ and in 2011 with Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2670

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com