Reportedly, audiences were weeping when the strange and beautiful girl, Helen Rose (the young Elizabeth Taylor), dies from gross neglect. Jane Eyre’s dismal schooling is particularly effective. In this version, the most touching sequences belong to Peggy Ann Garner. To accommodate Welles, who was very popular as a director and actor, the role was expanded. However, in the original book, Jane was the protagonist and Rochester was more of a supporting, if solid, part.

In fact, Welles was such a powerful presence that after his grand entrée, the movie loses its balance. While Welles gives a strong, stylized, bigger-than-life expressionistic performance, Fontaine, who also narrates the saga, essays a quiet, restrained, more naturalistic mode. The ominous music, by the brilliant Welles associate Bernard Herrmann (“Citizen Kane’), who would become Hitchcock’s most frequent and favorite musician, enriches the tales and links between the various segments. A wedding is planned but it fails to materialize For a while, Jane seems destined to remain a spinster for the rest of her life, though from the start there is attraction growing between her and Rochester. They live on the Yorkshire moors in a huge house, Thornfield Hall. Jane takes a job as a governess to the ward (Margaret O’Brien) of Yohshireman Edward Rochester (Orson Welles), the troubled owner, inflicted by brooding manner and vague, enigmatic personality. In due course, she courageously leaves the residence of Brockelhurst (Henry Daniell)-despite warning that girls of her kind cannot do it on their own. In the early scenes, the role of Jane Eyre is played by Peggy Ann Garner (she played the lead in Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”). The story should be familiar by now: Jane Eyre is an orphan who has been tossed about by fate and circumstances, but with her strong will, she has managed to survive her sordid upbringing and rough background.

Though shot on sound stages of the Fox, this adaptation is atmospheric and ominous, largely due to Barnes’ dark cinematography, which evokes the novel’s grim bleakness-visually it almost qualifies as a period film noir. In 1944, Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles played the leads, Jane Eyre and Rochester, and though Welles looks much older than Fontaine (and his real age), the actors are more or less the same age.

In 1934, first talkie version with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive

Jane eyre movie