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 This movie is adapted from a "great Victorian love story" by Charlotte Bronte
and stars Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. Jane Eyre has a bad childhood and
then gets a job as a governess at Thornfield where Edward Rochester lives. She
and Edward fall in love and decide to get married, but the wedding is cancelled
when "a visitor suddenly reveals the shocking secret that Rochester has kept all
these years". They say this one has "stylish cinematography and [a]
forbidding, eerie atmosphere". 1944, 96 minutes, VHS
I like to think that we just don't try to point you in the direction of good
movies and steer you careening away from poor ones here. I believe that we
have the power to inform and educate and every now and again I feel compelled
to interrupt my even-handed style in dealing with movies that make you wish you
were having your prostate checked by your local priest instead of sitting
through them so that I can teach. After viewing this film, based on one of those Bronte sisters' books (they
must have been like the Jackson family of 19th century Brit lit or something),
I need to give you all one of the few things I learned without the aid of those
wonderful Chicken Soup For The White Trash Soul volumes that I keep stealing from the hefty middle age broad that works in my
favorite antique and used clothing store (there's nothing I like better than
wearing clothes that smell like someone else). What I've figured out is that if
you ever get rich, well
strike that because there's really no use in any us ever pretending that
you're going to amount to much of anything beyond assistant manager at the
local Sonic, but if you ever move out of the halfway house or your mom's garage
apartment and get your own place (I know that 75% of you have already skipped
ahead because this will never apply to you) do not, I repeat, do not name your
house. I don't care how tempting or cute you think it would be. After seeing
this movie and many others about rich people that name their houses, I can only
come to the conclusion that it's more dangerous than it's worth. Let's look at
the evidence. In Citizen Kane, Chuck Kane had that place he named after that
Olivia Newton-John movie. Putting aside the wisdom of naming your home after a
movie that featured roller skating, we all know what happened to Chuck. Dead.
Now, if you check out the movie Rebecca, you'll see a house named Mandalay.
That was nothing but trouble for star Joan Fontaine and resulted in it burning
down or her being haunted by someone's dead wife, or kissing Laurence Olivier
or some such catastrophe. In Jane Eyre, it's Joan Fontaine again playing
the title role and this time she's gone and shacked up with Orson Welles at
his pad which is called Thornfield. It turns out that living in Thornfield has
its
own myriad problems, not the least of which is putting up with that little
charmer, Margaret O'Brien, as a French kid.  Before we go to the Thornfield open house and check in Orson's medicine cabinet
to see if he prefers ribbed or natural, we need to do a little background check
on this Jane Eyre character. She's one of those slight orphan girls (I hate
the word "waif" because it reminds too much of "wafer" and then I start
thinking about how I should go down to Wal-Mart and pick me up a box of Nilla
Wafers with their golden-brown, crumbly, vaguely vanilla-tasting goodness and
that's just not on my Deal-A-Meal plan) that has a bad attitude while she's
living with her evil aunt and her prissy son. It isn't long before the aunt
tells Jane that she's going to get to go away to a special school for girls.
Jane is excited because now she'll get to learn stuff and be at a school where
everyone will love her (I remember reading on the Internet Movie Database that
star Joan Fontaine had a 160 I.Q., but I think it's safe to say that her
character clocks it at about half that rate). This place she's going is called
Lowood and just to show her aunt who has all the stroke now that she's off to
this special school, she cuts a vitrolic promo on the aunt in the front yard
just before she tells the coachman to hit her music and take her off to Lowood.
Well, when she gets to Lowood, it doesn't really look like an exclusive school
for
girls, so much as an exclusive school for girls that are orphans that nobody
loves. Wah, wah, wah, waaaaa! Sorry, Jane, it turns out that you've just been
doublecrossed into the meanest, dirtiest prison, I mean exclusive school for
girls, that Victorian England has to offer. And it isn't mean or tough in a
good way. This isn't one of those Italian school for girls where the nubile
students have all-night pot parties, hump the P.E. teacher and get slashed by
some disgruntled student and/or faculty member. This is one of those places
run by a guy who knows that God wants him to treat his charges like you treat
that roach that always seems to be in your Cookie Crisp every Saturday morning.
 For ten long years (the movie thankfully skips over most of this time period,
but you knew that because the running time is only 96 minutes, not 10 years),
Jane is at this school and she manages to keep her bad attitude in check
(marching around in the rain holding a couple of irons and wearing a sign that
said something like "vain", "pride" or "Go Cardinals" will learn you in hurry).
The headmaster sees that she has matured into a compliant young lady and thus
graciously offers her a position teaching at Lowood. Jane is rather ungrateful
for this generous offer and tells this guy that she would rather have her big
sister, Olivia de Havilland's career, than ever work for him and his poopy
school. She's got her resumes out there and it isn't long before she gets a
lucrative job offer to be the governess at this English manor called
Thornfield. When she gets there, the man of the house, Edward Rochester, is
nowhere to be found, but she is welcomed by the housekeeper and is introduced to
Adele, the little French kid that Edward is galavanting around the world to no
doubt avoid. She's a peppy little thing who is obsessed with dancing and if
you're searching your three brain cells wondering just where in the dickens
you've
seen her before, I have just one word: Tootie! No, you ignorant dolt, not that
girl from The Facts Of Life that hung out with the fat chick, this is the
Tootie that hung out with Judy Garland and hijacked trolley cars in Meet Me In St. Louis! Sadly, Adele doesn't do much more than get on Orson Welles' nerves when he
finally comes home, but you do admire the self-discipline that Jane shows when
she doesn't take the opportunity to shove the little moppet down the stairs,
poison her food, or set her bed aflame. Anyway, Rochester comes back and meets
Jane and you're wondering whether Orson is playing himself as he launches into
these lengthy monologues that only he cares about or can understand (half of
what he says is lost because he's growling and snarling and spewing out all his
purple prose so fast that you marvel that he was able to remember all his
lines).  Welles' Rochester is a globe trotting playboy. But he's actually much deeper
than that. You see, whenever he comes back to Thornfield he likes to show his
brooding side. He's got some deep dark secret that he carries around to prove
he's a tortured soul that just needs to get busy with the so-prim-she's-hot
governess. For reasons that I'll never fully understand, Jane is put off by
Eddie's brusque manner and long-winded soliloquies (one time she asked some
question and she barely had it out of her pursed lips when Eddie interrupted
her with the answer in a kind of "I'm glad you asked that, now let me fill you
in my views on the meaning of life (extended mix)" way and began barfing out
his blather for about five minutes as he paced and looked pensively into the
fireplace and I just busted out laughing because throughout the movie Orson
threatens to rumble from character into caricature and this is an instance
where that finally occurs. We love to see rich people with their dirty little
secrets almost as we love to see rich people get their comeuppance (see Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons ) so it comes as a welcome relief that there is
something mysterious going on in one of Thornfield's towers. Whatever it is
cackles now and again and also sets Orson's bed on fire. Jane's curiosity is
piqued to say the least (and if I were her, I would be investing in an asbestos
nightie), but she has too much pining away to do to launch her own
investigation. She's gone and fallen in love with Eddie, but he seems to have
a empty-headed fiancee that is only after his money. There's plenty of
scenes where Joan does her best to look mournful and sad and she frequently
stares into Eddie's eyes with her eyes full of tears and everything is so
deadly serious that you wonder just how much fun these two could ever have if
they ever
stopped being tormented and just hooked the hell up. Just when it seems like
Eddie is going to marry the blonde gold digger and Jane is ready to pack her
stuff and leave her aching heart behind, he ditches the gold digger and has his
big scene where he gets Jane to vocally proclaim her love for him. As she
does, a gigantic storm rolls in, blowing stuff everywhere and a bolt of
lightning hits a tree shattering a branch. Who is she dating? Moses? They decide to get married, but it gets called off at the last second, because
some nosy jackass picks that time to reveal Eddie's secret to everyone. Jane
is crushed and leaves Eddie, eventually ending up back at her aunt's house.
Even though Jane's life has turned to warm beer, she should be heartened to
hear that her sissy cousin developed a gambling problem, bankrupted the aunt,
hung himself, and caused the aunt to have a stroke. Whoa! When do you we get
to see that movie Charlotte? Later, she's standing at the window and a storm
rolls in and she hears Eddie's voice calling for her. At this point I was
pretty sure her ex-boyfriend was God. She goes running back to Thornfield and
sees that someone has gone and burned it done. At this point I would normally
make my Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez comment about how she burned Andre Rison's
mansion down, but since she went and got herself killed in some foreign
country, I won't bring it up. I have always wondered what the name of Andre's
house was though. Eddie is somehow now blind, but Jane and he end up together
(his secret is no longer a problem) and share a dramatic hug in a long shot
that closes the film. It's safe to say that this one frequently goes way over
the top in the melodrama department and Welles seems determined to show
everyone how much blustery emotion he can pack into all his big speeches and
moody stares, whereas Joan does a nice job of being the restrained gal who
doesn't want to allow herself to think that Eddie would ever want her. The
movie is watchable enough despite several moments that make you roll your eyes
and wonder why director Robert Stevenson couldn't get Orson to turn things down
several notches (at least for a few scenes). Eddie's secret that he has locked
up in the attic isn't really dealt with very much and he explains it all in one
brief scene. I would have enjoyed it if the movie could have cut out about
thirty shots of Jane Eyre making cry baby faces in Eddie's direction and ramped
up the menace of the secret. In fact, this secret is treated like such a
secondary thing for most of the movie that when it causes Eddie to go blind
(no, it's not that kind of secret!) and his house to burn up, you're just kind
of surprised, rather than dreading something like that would happen. I know
they foreshadowed that with the burning bed, but no one seemed to care that much
when it happened and I pretty much forgot about it. It is one of those moodily
photographed affairs that drenches things with a overbearing feeling of doom
and you wonder if Welles gave Stevenson any tips of how to shoot certain scenes
(I can't imagine him doing that!), though they don't really have any of
the inventiveness that marked Welles' style. The movie was a bit too
self-serious
in its treatment of Eddie and Jane's love (what was with all those storms?) and
Welles stands out as "performing" at times he shouldn't have, but if you can
tolerate its sometimes sluggish pace, it's a fair piece of English gothic.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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