Overall, I did not feel that Orson Welles captured what is most moving and profound in Bronte's novel. First and foremost, that would be the love story between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, tainted and shackled by bad circumstances. The novel gives one the feeling of profound love and passion - and profound pain at the continual delay of their victory.
Orson Welles' film does a great job of depicting the world of the characters, and in a sense, representing their inner turmoil through the look of that world. But in terms of the interaction between Jane and Rochester I feel that the film became more of a stage for Orson Welles to try out a role that was far more eccentric and psychologically complex than he was capable of. Not to mention that Joan Fontaine exhibits none of the purity or repression of a merely 18-year-old woman who has been abused since childhood. It is the combination of real Rochester and Jane, the inherent craziness of the characters for what they have both gone through, that makes the love story in the book so real and so inevitable.
Where Orson Welles did handle the acting well in this regard was through tiny gestures and facial expressions that the actors exchanged here and there to evoke a very real and palpable attraction. One example would be the scene where Mr. Rochester says, "I hope you'll like it here," and Jane looks at him and lets escape the kind of smile that a woman can only give a man she has a billowing desire for, as she says,"Yes, I think so." He returns, "Good, I'm glad."
These are moments of a valuable experience of love from Orson Welles' perspective; however, I maintain that he misrepresents the depth of Jane's repression and Rochester's strangeness as originally written. While pleasing for an audience, Welles' characters were far more bourgeois than the originals.
What I do love about this film - and this particular version of Jane Eyre - is that it accurately captures the gothic, surreal sensibility of parts of the book.
The childhood segments, for example, translated the surreality of the original book brilliantly.
In particular, the look and attitude of the young Jane Eyre really captured her preciousness, her intelligence, sensitivity and alienation. Mrs. Reed was presented in a nightmarish way - like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. The way her face, and the face of the Lowood Orphanage's headmaster (shown 3 stills below) were shot, close-up and a bit distorted, gave a strong sense of the hauntingly abusive world experienced by Jane Eyre.
St. John,
the cold, self-denying pastor into whose arms Jane ends up landing after her failed wedding when knocking at the door of a stranger,
is not depicted in this version of the film. It's understandable, as
the novel is long, and even in the reading of it, that section begins
to feel like a book within a book. However, I've thought about the
character several times since I read the book... and St. John reminds me of Tom Courtenay as Pasha in "Dr.
Zhivago."
The
two characters have everything in common. They're both handsome and
bright and in love with beautiful women, but when given the chance to be
with those women (in St. John's case, it's not Jane but another woman
he loves, originally), they spurn that pleasure and happiness in order to
devote themselves to something greater. Yet it's their unreasonable level of devotion that makes them cold, bitter, and ultimately
undeserving of the glory they hope to attain. As St. John did not appear in Welles' film, Tom Courtenay's
performance as Pasha could be a good reference for his screen doppleganger.
