If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a classic it would be forgotten.
So why another “Jane Eyre,” then, with so many perfectly serviceable ones already available on DVD or download? The simplest answer is that movies get remade all the time, and the great 19th-century novelists Austen and the Brontë sisters especially have proved to be an inexhaustible and almost foolproof resource.ĭouglas McGrath, who has directed movie versions of both Austen’s “Emma” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” by Charles Dickens, wrote recently in an e-mail message: “What makes a classic a classic is that the story always has relevance to whatever generation is reading it. A couple of the movies have lingered a little on the sultry, Creole ancestry of Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, and on a theme of colonial exploitation, but so far the one truly ground-breaking version is John Duigan’s 1993 film of “Wide Sargasso Sea,” the Jean Rhys novel that tells the story from the point of view of Bertha, the madwoman locked in the attic. Even the sentimental 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version, with William Hurt embarrassingly miscast as a Rochester more nearly a mild eccentric than a brooding, Byronic type, has its moments.
If there has never been a definitive movie “Jane Eyre,” there has never been a truly rotten one. So moviegoers may be forgiven if in recollection all the “Jane Eyres” seem to blend together in one continuous loop, with Joan Fontaine, the 1943 Jane, suddenly becoming colorized and morphing into Susannah York, while Rochester turns, like a character in a horror film, from Orson Welles into George C. Several, including the current one, were even filmed on the same location: Haddon Hall, an ancient, battlemented manor house in wind-swept Derbyshire that gets pressed into service whenever British filmmakers need someplace old and dank looking. So far there have been at least 18 film versions, going back to a 1910 silent movie, and 9 made-for-television “Janes” so many that they sometimes seem to quote from one another as much as from the novel. Of all the classic 19th-century novels, Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” has been by far the most filmed, outstripping even the ever-durable “Pride and Prejudice.”
CARY FUKUNAGA, the director of the new movie version of “Jane Eyre,” which opens Friday, joked recently that there was an unwritten law requiring that “Jane Eyre” be remade every five years.