For my third Orson Welles feature, I wanted to do a film where only his acting is evident in the final picture. For the vast majority of the movies I want to cover, he typically acts as the director and writer, but not in every picture. And with Jane Eyre, it represents the first movie he took where he is neither the director nor writer.
Except that he was reportedly heavily involved in the behind-the-scenes of the making of this movie and wasn't just an actor like I thought he was. Apparently, there was some debate prior to the release of this movie over whether to give Welles a producer credit, because Welles helped with the changes to the script, the casting, and the editing.
He was not given a producer credit, because the infamous Hollywood film producer David O Selznick didn't want Welles to overshadow the actual director Robert Stevenson. Just earlier that year, Journey into Fear (which I will not be covering) was released and Welles' involvement did just that to director Norman Foster. Selznick was worried about Stevenson being seen as a "stooge."
Regardless of Welles' impact in the final film, IMDB does not credit him as the director in any way. For Journey into Fear, he's listed as one of the two directors of that film with Foster. And while he may have helped with changes to the script, he's also not given credit there either, and three other guys are, so this may just be the best I'll get in terms of minimal involvement from Welles.
As for the movie, well I've talked about the making of the movie, because I actually find it more interesting than the movie itself. So far I've watched two of Welles movies, and this is the first one that makes me fear the time period of some of these movies may just be a huge impediment for me. Citizen Kane, if there ever was one, is one of those "exceptions to the rule" movies while I had no fear that me not particularly like Othello meant anything about the rest of Welles' filmography because of the myriad of hoops it already had to jump through for me to like it.
But Jane Eyre, theoretically, should be more accessible than Othello (and it is), and I'm a little worried that Citizen Kane is just a huge outlier (because, well it is!). I'm still happy to watch Orson Welles' films, but I would prefer to praise his films.
If I were to look at a film that doesn't appear to be an Orson Welles film except for him acting in it, I still don't think Jane Eyre is a good example. This is kind of filmed in his style. A few scenes in Jane Eyre reminded me of Othello, because there is a shit ton of fog for no discernible reason. I mean the reason is "to create mood," but you just don't see fog much in movies, so that caught my attention.
This movie is probably strongest, oddly enough, in the first 30 minutes of the movie. When Orson Welles is not in any of it. Jane Eyre's childhood features what is probably about as good of child acting as you got at the time. I won't say Peggy Ann Garner is perfect - but it's vastly better than most child acting at the time. And you also get a very young Elizabeth Taylor, who is also good. I've never seen a child look so much like her adult self like Elizabeth Taylor, which was very weird.
But then Jane goes into the mansion and I did not particularly like the performance of Margaret O'Brien as Adele, which it's a movie in 1943, it's amazing I like even two performances from kid actors, three would just be a miracle.
And Welles and Joan Fontaine have... basically no chemistry. Fontaine is very quiet, subdued, and Welles is very theatrical, and it doesn't really mesh that well. It has the weird effect of me not really thinking either actor is bad, but they're just giving performances as if they're in two totally separate movies. And it's that classic old Hollywood thing where they basically glance at each other once and are suddenly in love.
And parts of the book are just weird now. Like for instance the ending. Jane realizes she wants to go back to Rochester, and he finds him in a burned down house. His "mad wife" burned it down and it caused him to go blind when unsuccessfully tried to save her. And then they have a son, and his vision is cured. What the fuck kind of ending is that?
And look. I know Bernard Hermann is a legendary composer of movies. He did Citizen Kane, he did Psycho. But the score was too much. Too loud, too here's how you should feel. We're still a few decades from the golden age of movie scores, so I don't necessarily think this is his fault necessarily, it's just that movies tended to have scores that were loud and told you how to feel more than later.
Anyway, this movie wasn't really for me. I suspect that may be true of a few of the projects I'll look at over this series, moreso than the Soderbergh marathon, although if you followed that, you'd know I wasn't really feeling a few of his movies either. And Welles is simply in this, he didn't direct this. But I'm happy to have knock one Joan Fontaine movie off my list at the least.
2/4 stars
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