Focus Features

By the time Robert Stevenson’s adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre made it to the screen on February 3, 1944, its long journey echoed that of the story’s famous orphan. In 1941, David O. Selznick announced his intentions to produce the film with United Artists distributing it. British émigré Robert Stevenson signed on to direct. As a member of the Brontë Society, Stevenson had long dreamed of this project. After extensive casting, Selznick decided on Joan Fontaine for Jane and Orson Welles for Rochester, especially since Welles had played him on a radio play put on by his own Mercury Theater. In fact, the radio script penned by John Houseman had enormous influence on the film script, which was credited to Houseman, Stevenson, and the novelist Aldous Huxley, who had recently begun writing for Hollywood. By 1942, however, Selznick started selling off his literary properties in order to raise cash, and by the end of the year had settled on a deal with Twentieth Century-Fox. Under new management, Stevenson pushed the project forward, with much help from Orson Welles who eventually was offered (but declined) a producing credit. But even with no credit, Welles was perceived, fairly or not, as the source of the film’s dark melodramatic tone and a plot shift that made Rochester––much more than Jane––the central character. And while some, like the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, found this interpretation “grimly fascinating,” others found its dark romanticism enchanting.