I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory.

Today there are 289 confirmed cases in Croydon, out of a local population of 385,346.  Yesterday it was 261 so once again I have been confined between the walls...

Jane Eyre was on the television yesterday.  The 1943 version with Orson Wells and Joan Fontain.  Orson Wells - feeling awkward that the US army wouldn't have him becuase of his poor heath - invested his fee from the film into "The Mercury Wonder Show for Service Men" for which entry was free for service men but highly expensive for rich civilians.  According to wikipedia Welles would subject a high paying punter in each show -"usually Sam Goldwyn or Jack Warner or somebody like that" — to humiliations that included having eggs broken over their heads. "And they had to pretend it was all good fun, because our boys in khaki were there, you know. We really gave it to them."

Anyway having wandered away from the point a bit ...it wasn't a bad adaptation but possibly the most memorable bits are the depictions of Jane's childhood.  The young Jane is played in this version by Peggy Ann Garner (one of those child actresses whose career went ...) and really simple bits of direction are used very effectively to mark Jane out as a loner/outcast such as showing Jane responding ever-so-slightly-more-slowly than the other girls because she doesn't know the rules at the grim boarding school for girls that is the "Lowood Institution"... and the punishments.

The Lowood Institution is presided over by the loathsome Reverend Brocklehurst (played by Henry Daniell) ... a puritanical tyrant, who subjects his charges to such humiliations as carrying irons in the rain with signs round their necks ...and standing on stools for hours on end.... and other sorts of "community payback" things of the kind that New Labour and Jack Straw were really fond of.

The lighting of the stool scene is fanastic with the shadows from the railings imprisoning Jane on either side...

The result of all this sadism is that Jane's real mentor becomes Dr. Rivers (John Sutton) who rescues Jane and her friend Helen Burns from wandering round in the rain adorned with irons and placards but not soon enough to prevent the death of Helen.  We see Jane and Helen (a very young Elizabeth Taylor - above right - whose carrer went slightly better) go to bed together only for Jane to wake up holding Helen's dead hand ... The camera then remains on the hand and then fades to black then cuts to Jane sobbing into the ground in the churchyard only to be told by Dr. Rivers that her duty to God is to go back to school... Lucky Jane!

The contrast between the sadistic man of God (The Reverend Brocklehurst) and the kindly man of science (Dr. Rivers) was not lost on contempory reviewers with one remarking that: "We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre."

Yes, down with those Chartists and their universal suffrage...

If you're wondering why I'm mainly reviewing the first reel rather than the 2nd or 3rd it's perhaps because everyone knows how Jane Eyre ends - it's been adapted countless times ... and its main claim to fame is as one of the first novels to be narrated from a first person perspective. 

Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and Charlotte Bronte (then Currer Bell) admitted to having been strongly influenced by Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and "Dotheboys Hall" in her imaginings of Lowood (or so I've read).

This may somewhat explain why the opening doesn't mesh with the rest of the novel - Well, I'm never quite sure what the point of Jane's awful childhood is apart from that's what happens in 19th century novels...

...if it's just that she had an awful childhood or it's meant to show the kind of adult she turns into ... although she is labelled from childhood as "rebellious" she isn't really - she's just trying to survive ...and maybe that's the point.

Unless, of course, it's setting up her leaving the bigamistic Mr Rochester whose invitation to live in sin while his mad wife is locked away in the attic never seemed that enticing to me.  Wells does very well at capturing Rochester's bitter brooding nature.  While the Reverend Brocklehurst is a holier-than-thou bully ...Rochester is the reverse ...a cynical-self-despising ...erm ... I'm not sure if he's a bully or a wally but it's a bit narratively convenient his wife burns the house down and jumps to her death but then again...

... that's romance for you.

I dunno... Anyway, she certainly created a new literary form ... the "pseudo-autobiography" ...and whether he read it or not - Dickens apparently claimed never to have read or approved of the book...

...one wonders if the first person narration of, for example, David Copperfield, would have happened without Jane Eyre...

Eh, Mr Dick...?


Postscript... Ava Alexis observed that Mrs Reed in this film version is played by Agnes Moorehead of Betwitched fame - who of course was also Citizen Kane's mum in ...erm ...Orson Wells most famous film.  We both agreed too that the early part of the book has been heavily rewritten here.  For example in the novel Dr. Rivers is in fact  St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) Rivers.  I'm not sure what other changes to the narrative have taken place but it's clear that this is why the first half of the film where Jane is a girl and the second where she's a woman don't quite seem to fit together here...