Studio: 20th Century Fox
Running time: 96 minutes
Jane Eyre (1943)
“An all-star cast — including Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Agnes Moorehead and Elizabeth Taylor — breathes magnificent life into this captivating 1944 [sic] film version of Charlotte Brontë’s gothic romance novel. Adapted for the screen by Aldous Huxley, Robert Stevenson and John Houseman, and directed by Stevenson, this stirring film is the definitive version of the engrossing classic!
“After spending her childhood in an orphanage, young Jane Eyre (Fontaine) becomes governess to the ward of an imposing older man named Edward Rochester (Welles). Ultimately, Jane’s gentle influence forces Rochester to drop his forbidding veneer, and he proposes to her. But the discovery that Rochester is already married, and further, that his volatile wife is locked in the attic, prompts Jane to leave as a series of tragic events unfold in this riveting classic that also features Margaret O’Brien.” [From the DVD]
Cast
Edward Rochester: Orson Welles
Jane Eyre: Joan Fontaine
Adele Varens: Margaret O’Brien
Jane (as a child): Peggy Ann Garner
Dr. Rivers: John Sutton
Bessie: Sara Allgood
Brocklehurst: Henry Daniell
Mrs. Reed: Agnes Moorehead
Colonel Dent: Aubrey Mather
Mrs. Fairfax: Edith Barrett
Lady Ingram: Barbara Everest
Blanche Ingram: Hillary Brooke
Grace Poole: Ethel Griffies
Leah: Mae Marsh
Miss Scatcherd: Eily Maylon
Mr. Briggs: Erskine Sanford
Mason: John Abbott
Beadle: Yorke Sherwood
John: Ronald Harris
Auctioneer: Charles Irwin
Helen: Elizabeth Taylor
Crew
Director: Robert Stevenson
Producer: William Goetz
Screenwriters: Aldous Huxley, Robert Stevenson, and John Houseman
Based on the Novel by: Charlotte Brontë
Cinematographer: George Barnes
Art Directors: James Basevi and Wiard B. Ihnen
Special Effects: Fred Sersen
Musical Score: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: Walter Thompson
Costumes: René Hubert
Did You Know?
Margaret O’Brien later shared that she and her young co-stars, Elizabeth and Penny Ann Garner, developed schoolgirl crushes on actor John Sutton, who played the kindly Dr. Rivers in the film.
Elizabeth’s performance as the orphan Helen Burns in Jane Eyre was uncredited. Decades later, she and her family sat down to watch the film on television, only to find that her small part had been removed entirely from the broadcast. “They’d cut my entire part out!” she lamented.