Jane Eyre (1943) on Netflix
Orphaned and unwanted, Jane Eyre is sent to a charity school. She becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, meets its master, Edward Rochester, and hears laughter in the house at night.
- Netflix4.4/5
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- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jane Eyre spends her childhood in the household of her aunt, Mrs. Reed, who does not want her. Mrs. Reed arranges for her to go to Lowood, a charity school run by the harsh Mr. Brocklehurst, who calls her a liar in front of the other pupils. She finds a friend in a fellow pupil, Helen Burns. Ten years on, twenty-year-old Jane declines a teaching post at Lowood and becomes governess to a girl named Adèle at Thornfield, an isolated house. She takes the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, for her employer. On a walk she startles a horse, injuring its rider, and later learns he is Edward Rochester, the master of Thornfield, who questions her in his library. One night she wakes to strange laughter and finds his bed curtains on fire; he tells her nothing.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Jane Eyre (1943)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Orson Welles was signed to play Edward Rochester in December 1942, no longer with RKO and eager for money to purchase, develop and cut the footage of his unpaid government project It's All True. He hired himself out as an actor, the first of many times he funded his own projects by acting in more conventional films.
- Aldous Huxley, one of the film's screenwriters, chose to keep the character of Mrs. Rochester unseen in Jane Eyre, which made her more menacing and circumvented British censorship rules on depicting madness.
- The September 18, 1938, Mercury Theatre on the Air adaptation of Jane Eyre is lost because Welles used the acetate original to prepare the film and the recording was irreparably damaged.
- Bernard Herrmann based his Jane Eyre score on music he had written for "Rebecca", the first episode of Welles's radio series The Campbell Playhouse. Fox music head Alfred Newman, admiring Herrmann's work for RKO, gave him the rare privilege of conducting his own score, the first of many he wrote for the studio.
- John Houseman had nothing to do with producing the final film; unhappy when he saw the movie, he asked for his name to be removed from Jane Eyre, but his credit stayed.
