Laurence Olivier was an overripe scene partner in Rebecca, but Welles is an out-and-out scene thief, hulking in dramatically expressive shots manifestly composed and lit to favor the associate producer over his retiring co-star. Fontaine was never one to assertively foreground herself, and she's altogether swamped by Welles's grandiose, hammy melancholy. Rochester is a domineering figure in Jane's life, and to see Welles running roughshod over Fontaine in their shared scenes does at least tie in to that aspect of the scenario. The results are more than slightly frustrating, though weirdly appropriate to the story. And regardless of how much behind-the-camera force he was bringing to bear on the production, there's no denying the enormous scale of his on-camera personality. By some accounts, and by the obvious onscreen evidence, Welles was quite a hands-on producer (director Robert Stevenson has made many fine movies, including the iconic Mary Poppins 21 years later, but the Wellesian deep staging littered throughout this film was never one of his calling cards). For here, the role was played by associate producer Orson Welles, in the first of what would prove to be many make-work jobs taken on to finance his directorial efforts. Rochester is a sweeping, overpowering presence on the page and in most every dramatization, and the '43 Jane Eyre might just be the most overpowering of them all. Here, she clashes with the brooding, depressive Edward Rochester, owner of the home and man of the requisite Dark Libertine Past of a 19th Century Gothic romantic lead. Jane Eyre, for those of you who've never had the pleasure of reading the book (for my money, it's one of the crown jewels of 19th Century English-language fiction), is the tale of how 20-year-old Jane, after a decade spent in a cruel charity school, takes up a job as governess at Thornfield, a gloomy mansion inhabited by a fragment of the appropriate number of residents and servants. I will commit an act of grave apostasy by suggesting that Fontaine is better here than she was in that 1940 film there's a certain toughness in her posture and facial expressions that hadn't much appeared in her screen acting prior to this, and which considerably deepens the "meek virgin" trope she's once again saddled with. Fontaine appears once again as a delicate, innocent ingénue dropped into a rambling Gothic mansion where a bullying man falls in love with her, in a story whose horror-film atmosphere (courtesy, in both cases, of cinematographer George Barnes) could be given the gloss of prestige and class thanks to the material's literary origins. Selznick, who had assembled all of the main components in an apparent bid to replicate his Oscar-winning Rebecca.
until February, 1944.īy the time the film arrived at 20th Century Fox, it had already passed through the hands of super-producer David O.
We come now to the film made immediately after this golden run: the second talkie adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic Jane Eyre, released in the United Kingdom at the very end of 1943, but held back from the U.S. Joan Fontaine's reign at the top of the Hollywood pyramid was short and intense: three out of four movies made in three out of four years netted her Oscar nominations, with a win for the second, Suspicion. Part two of our Joan Fontaine celebration.
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