People may not know this about her, but Miss Cleo is an avid reader. Plenty of it may not be my particular bag, but she’s got some solid stuff adorning the shelves in her “office”. (…What do you call the room where a seer does her work, anyway?) One such offering is a version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, complete with creepy-cool illustrations by Dame Darcy. After showing me this book and speaking on it for a while, Miss Cleo bade me witness a cinematic version, namely the 1943 Orson Welles-led one.
Now, back in the summer before my senior year of high school, I was tasked to read Jane Eyre and Invisible Man (the Ralph Ellison tome, not the entertaining H.G. Wells sci-fi classic). Not being a fan of Victorian fiction (seriously, the hell is up with that garbage?), I wasn’t looking forward to the former, but I found myself being pleasantly surprised by how not-bad it was. I’m not saying I loved the book, but it was definitely pretty decent. (I can’t say the same for Invisible Man, though…) So my expectations for this film were neither soaring nor grounded. Almost perfect, really.
The story is your basic Jane Eyre, but with one major difference: Rochester is given an expanded role, mostly due to Welles being such a major star at the time. And I gotta say, Welles has his mojo running wild here. Oscillating between deathly charismatic and almost drunk-slurring brooding, Welles dominates every second of his screen time, and he is more than aware of it. Facing this mountain is mousy little Joan Fontaine, who handles herself very well in the title role. She provides a lot of subtle nuance in her quiet portrayal, but some parts of Jane’s underlying spirit are lost a bit beneath that very quiet. Still, when the two of them are on screen together, be it for the purposes of flirting or otherwise, there is palpable chemistry that comes across as almost surprising for its seeming genuine quality.
Providing some solid support are Peggy Ann Garner as the childhood version of Jane (a child performance that wasn’t annoying as hell, unlike that of compatriot Margaret O’Brien, who plays Rochester’s daughter Adele, a little girl I wanted to strangle from moment one), Agnes Moorehead as Jane’s wicked aunt (you can just see her about to hiss out some insult toward an as-yet-unknown “Derwood”), and Henry Daniell as the stern martinet Brocklehurst.
Beyond the exceptional performances, though, are the real stars of the production: The set design and cinematography are stellar, creating a gothic feel replete with harsh shadows that allow for sweeping tenebrist settings and stark chiaroscuro. There is a definite Third Man sort of thing going on here, aiding the dramatic atmosphere the filmmakers injected the story into. This should come as no surprise, given the involvement of the cinematographer of Rebecca, Spellbound, and War of the Worlds and art direction from veterans of Spellbound, Lifeboat, and Duck Soup.
And the story is scripted by three writers: John Houseman, known mostly for his turn as the stern professor from The Paper Chase (but also known as an uncredited contributing writer on Citizen Kane); director Robert Stevenson, who helmed the classics Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks; and, preeminently,fucking Aldous Huxley, famed author of Brave New World and Point Counter Point. The second I learned of Huxley’s involvement, I was more excited to see this than I ever thought I could be. I may just have to check out the version of Pride and Prejudice he penned in 1940 at some point…
Combine some good acting with stellar writing and pointed art direction, and you’ve got the recipe for one damn fine specimen of ’40s filmmaking. Zero surprise from the divine Miss C, frankly.
I do have to question where the hell she obtained the DVD, though: It’s distributed by a Taiwanese company I’ve never heard of, it’s a region-free DVD-5 MPEG2 disc, and has no special features whatsoever, save some Chinese script accompanying the titles. And the back-of-the-box “blurb” (more like an essay-length, rambling description of the film) takes a pot shot at haters: “Some would carp that this was just so much overly sentimental hogwash but they are cynics who must be left in the cold.” Fair ’nuff, fair ’nuff.
Allusions of Grandeur 