After all, Jane Eyre has already inspired three musicals to date, not to mention two operas, two ballets and an orchestral symphony. Just as long as Cliff Richard, having made a musical out of Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff, doesn't turn his attention to another Brontë-sister Gothic hero. One day Wasikowska and Fassbender's post-feminist Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester will seem as dated as Welles and Fontaine's pre-feminist versions, but that is surely the attraction to successive generations of artists, delighted to revisit these archetypal lovers afresh.
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Toby Stephens seemed merely miscast in the most recent TV version, from 2006. Dalton had the dark Byronic looks, Hinds the masterful mien, Hurt seemed wistful, haunted and miscast. The most recent cinema version was Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 film starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as the adult Jane (Anna Paquin, Sookie in HBO's True Blood, played the younger version) and William Hurt as Rochester. Since then, TV has revisited Jane Eyre every 10 years or so: in 1973 with Sorcha Cusack and Michael Jayston in 1983, starring a pre-007 Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clark and in 1997, with Samantha Morton and Ciará* Hinds. British TV next serialised Jane Eyre in 1963, with the character actor Richard Leech – an intimidating presence, he played Mr Murdstone in the BBC's 1966 version of David Copperfield – in the role. There were five American versions in the early Fifties (including one with Charlton Heston as Rochester) before the first British serialisation, in 1956, with Stanley Baker – then typecast as the boorish heavy – as Rochester. The real rush of Jane Eyre adaptations had to wait for the television age, Brontë's story being well-suited to the expansiveness of a TV series. This Jane Eyre might have been better off remaining silent: the tinny dialogue comes across more like a drawing-room comedy than a Gothic romance. The first sound version was filmed in 1934, starring Colin Clive, in supremely dodgy sideburns, and Virginia Bruce, whose expressive, kohl-rimmed eyes were made for the silent era. There were seven silent films made of Brontë's 1849 novel, including Orphan of Lowood. Rochester’s wife.But back to the un-zombified screen renditions of Jane Eyre. So rather than going on all day about all the ways the old Jane Eyre was superior, I’m going to focus on just one thing, possibly my favorite part of the story–Mr. But there is one aspect of the story in particular that was unforgivably abridged in the new version of Jane Eyre. It’s understandable it ’s going to be a little more fleshed-out. After all, the BBC version is more than twice as long as the movie, and so obviously it has a huge advantage.
In the BBC version, it feels liek a natural extension of all that has gone before, because the BBC production does a much better job of fleshing out its characters, of making it feel like they are in love. The proposal feels like a forced contrivance designed to move the movie forward to the next scene.
Rochester are in love–after all, he must love her because he is proposing to her. It’s hard to lose yourself in a summary of a film, and sadly, that is exactly what the new Jane Eyre feels like.
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But only the full version contains the most essential ingredient of any good story–immersion. In both cases, you get the same story, which is to say you get the same sequence of events and the same conclusion. The difference between the new Jane Eyre film and the BBC miniseries is analogous to the difference between reading a heavily abridged version of a book and the book itself.