简爱电影的英文影评。

A fast hour and a half
of psychological doom and gloom, and glimmers of happiness through true
love trounced by the realities of 1840 England. It's all pretty amazing
stuff, and you have to see it to believe it, those dark clouds and
sprawling stone buildings.

Yes, Orson Welles is the lead male here, Mr. Rochester, and he's a
physical presence, for sure, but a stiff one. As just one slightly
unfair comparison, watch how Lawrence Olivier handles being lead male
in a similar era (1939) Bronte film, Wuthering Heights. It's unfair
because this earlier movie, directed by William Wyler, is even better
than Jane Eyre. But here we have an actress who wowed the world in the
masterful Rebecca in 1940, and with Olivier himself, and if you see
this Hitchcock movie, based on a Daphne du Maurier book, you'll see a
weirdly too similar echo of Charlotte Bronte's plot, complete with
mysterious master of the house and a big fire at the end.

This big mix and match is meant only to say that this kind of movie,
this kind of plot, reached a fever pitch in the early 1940s and
produced three masterpieces. You should see them all, and see the
influences back and front and sideways. Great stuff, with Jane Eyre the
third in line, made by the lesser known British director Robert
Stevenson (who had this one early success and then the other one, Mary
Poppins, of all things). But it was based on an Orson Welles radio
version of the story, which you can feel in the narrated lines with
Joan Fontaine's voice. You sense Welles had a hand in the whole feel of
the movie, the camera angles in the early scenes (looking up or down at
the child), and the overall Gothic excess and fog.

Great stuff to just feel and absorb.

A thoroughly engaging adaption of the brooding classic, this film rises above the turgid tone often imposed on other classics brought to the screen. Joan Fontaine turns in a brilliantly deceptively understated performance, and Orson Welles restrains from the scenery chewing that marred some of his own projects; there is surprising chemistry between them. At times, Welles is a downright "sexy" leading man! The script (credited to John Houseman and Aldous Huxley) captures the right "tone" of Victorian cruelty and repression.

Under Robert Stevenson's direction Fontaine/Welles seem to capture the essence of two abused outsiders resisting their attraction for one another, trying to adhere to convention. A strong supporting cast. There are brief though memorable appearances by Agnes Moorehead, Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Ann Garner as "young" Jane.

George Barnes' camera captures appropriately stark images of Ross Dowd and Thomas Little's sets. Charlotte Bronte's grim novel is well suited to the excellent B/W, cinematography: a memorable scene early in the film has young Jane being punished by being forced to stand on a stool that is nearly in the center of a fan of shadows cast by the stair railing, It is almost reminiscent of expressionist German films of the Weimar years.

The film manages to entertain as well as inform. Purists may object to the last 3 lines of the film which hint at a slightly happier denouement than the book offered. In spite of that, Jane Eyre is still a nearly flawless film.