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The screenplay for the film is credited to Aldous Huxley, the film’s director Robert Stevenson and John Houseman. All of these later works offer interesting illuminations on the novel and on the film adaptations. While Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ would seem to re-imagine the original: a filmic equivalent would be Val Lewton’s production of I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ could be seen as a novel that deconstructs the original, and the film (1940) follows suit. The 1943 Jane Eyre is clearly a film that aims at a degree of fidelity, allowing for both the stylistic conventions and dominant values of the studio film. And the third approach is one that re-imagines the novel, using selectively whatever fits. Then there are the versions that reinterprets or even deconstructs the novel. There is the adaptation that aims at relative fidelity to the source novel. It is worth restating one of the models frequently used in analysing adaptations of literature to film. It has a crew of stellar names, both in front of and behind the camera and microphone. It was filmed at the C20th studio at Century City and runs for 97 minutes in crisp, black and white Academy ratio. The 1943 version does to a great degree dramatise the book and has become one of is the most influential film versions. We do get the fire and subsequent blindness.
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And to cap this Rochester is daily expecting his marriage to be annulled.
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The house is affluent and cosy: indeed the staircase to the attic where Bertha (Claire Du Brey, who hardly seems mad at all) resides looks like any ground to first floor stairs. And the film also lacks any Gothic trappings. He completely lacks the dark mystery of the novel’s characterisation. Both Adele (Edith Fellows) and Blanche (Aileen Pringle) describe her as ‘pretty’. In both cases she is too attractive and too stylishly dressed. Jane is played by Jean Darling as a child and Virginia Bruce as an adult. Unlike some later versions we meet John Rivers (Desmond Roberts), but only in one short scene. So we get quite a lot of the book, but extremely condensed. It also rewrites the plot in a way that diminishes the story. The latter is stagey and suffers from the limitations of early sound. This 1943 version is one of the most famous and was preceded only by four fairly short silent versions and a relatively short feature length version in 1934. I have since seen at least six official translations to the screen and a number of other films clearly influenced by the novel. Jane Eyre’s passionate, tenacious and truculent resistance to being put down and patronised struck a strong chord with me.
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I first encountered it at the start of my teens, and read it twelve times in the space of a couple of years. This is an adaptation from one of the most potent novels in English literature written by Charlotte Brontë and published in 1847. There was also a panel discussion before the film. I was able to revisit C20th Fox’s classic film version of this story in a good quality 35mm print at the National Media Museum.