(Jane Austen, of an earlier generation and more a novelist of social manners, had died the year after Charlotte’s birth.) Young feminine hearts desired domination by a larger-than-life man-handsome, mysterious, even aloof, a man ready to introduce them to his new world. The youngest of the three Brontë sisters, she followed in the footsteps of other women novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Fanny Burney who wrote about young ladies’ introduction to the cruel, male-dominated world of the Industrial Revolution. Coincidence?Ĭharlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, published under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, is in the style of the Gothic novel popular in England at the time. Seen in retrospect, however, that film could easily be a teaching example of the Wellesian technique.
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That director, Carol Reed, though clearly impressed by Orson, was a strong enough personality to maintain respectable control, even against an even stronger personality. It is well known that Welles’ control was seriously restricted in another film of similar milieu, The Third Man, set a hundred years later. But simply observing the screen, with its myriad shadows, deep focus images and the oppressive mood, as in The Stranger, which Welles did direct, it’s easy to doubt that Stevenson’s screen escaped untouched by Welles. It has been said that in Jane Eyre Stevenson was able to avoid any directorial influences from the omnipresent Welles.
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The screen-credited director, Englishman Stevenson, is best known for his Walt Disney films ( Kidnapped, Son of Flubber, Mary Poppins) and the mogul’s TV series Wonderful World of Color. Approaching us, he proclaimed, ‘All right, everybody, turn to page eight.’ And we did it, though he was not the director.” “On the first day,” she wrote in her autobiography No Bed of Roses, “at four o’clock”-having been many hours late-“he strode in followed by his agent, his secretary, his valet and a whole entourage. Jane Eyre is a dark film, darkly photographed by George Barnes ( Meet John Doe, Rebecca, War of the Worlds ), broodingly directed by Robert Stevenson and presided over, in ways not even now thoroughly understood, by what Fontaine called “such a big man in every way that no one could stand up to him.” Orson Welles. Danvers and suffocating for the master Maxim de Winter at Thornfield, the wife is very much alive, at first unknown to Jane, and hidden away in a tower room, for good reason.
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At Manderley, a dead wife holds a strange control over the living-worshipful for housekeeper Mrs. In the end, both houses suffer a conflagration, for the first a ritual cleansing, for the second a tender resolution. The secrets of the Cornish Manderley in Rebecca are replaced by those of a much more terrifying place, Thornfield Hall in Yorkshire. Much like the nameless heroine in Rebecca, in Jane Eyre a second heroine and survivor against harsh odds, Jane comes to live in another mysterious old house in the English countryside, not as a new wife but at first as a governess. In both Jane Eyre and Rebecca, each women is haunted by a previous wife, one quite insane and alive, one dead. To some degree, in another Alfred Hitchcock film, Suspicion, she would have a similar part as a naïve woman growing more and more fearful that her husband might be planning to murder her. de Winter in Rebecca, that of a demure woman with apparently little or no allure. In the 1943 version of Jane Eyre, Joan Fontaine is playing yet another variation on her role of the new Mrs.
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“Do you think because I’m poor and obscure and plain that I’m soulless and heartless? I have as much soul as you and fully as much heart.”- Jane to Mr.