The 1943 Jane Eyre (Twilight Time, Blu-ray) stars Joan Fontaine as Jane, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s classic Gothic romance about a meek orphan hired by a brooding aristocrat to be governess to his young ward, but it’s Orson Welles who dominates the drama with both his dark, electric presence as Edward Rochester and his influence behind the scenes of the production. He’s a bear of a Rochester, a rough, dark figure more at home with his hounds and horses than with people, and Welles drops his voice to a rumbling growl whether he’s barking orders or letting his guard down for a moment of intimacy.
The handsome production, one of the romantic classics of the forties, is directed by the literate British import Robert Stevenson but Welles had a considerable hand in the production, from the visual design of the production to script revisions, all of it uncredited. The result is a beautiful piece of Hollywood Gothic, sculpting a Victorian England completely out of Hollywood artifice and soundstage magic through magnificent set design, dramatic lighting and healthy helpings of stage fog. Just look to the cover of the disc for a sense of the visual atmosphere. This is one of the most expressionist American films of the era and Welles had no small hand in that.
Welles’ former producer and writing partner John Houseman co-wrote the literate screenplay with Aldous Huxley and Stevenson and longtime Welles composer Bernard Herrmann provides the dark, moody score. Agnes Moorehead (another Welles confederate) co-stars with Margaret O’Brien (as Rochester’s French ward), Peggy Ann Garner (Jane as a child) and Henry Daniell, and young Elizabeth Taylor has a small, unbilled role in the opening act as Jane’s only friend.
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F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (Kino, Blu-ray) is the first great vampire film, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (it was tied up by the Stoker estate for years) which recreates the famous bloodsucker as a feral ghoul: bald, fanged, clawed, a bat-like creature whose bloodlust battles his sexual lust for the virginal Ellen. Count Orlock (played by the spindly, skull-headed Max Schreck) is a veritable force of evil, carrying disease and destruction with him, and Murnau shoots him as an eerie creature of the night, rising like a corpse from his coffin when the sun goes down and skulking in shadow. This Blu-ray debut was mastered in HD from the archival 35mm restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and features separate versions of the film, one with newly-translated English intertitles and another with original German intertitles (with optional English subtitles), both color tinted and accompanied by Hans Erdmann’s original 1922 score. It also includes the supplements from the previous Kino release: 52-minute documentary “The Language of Shadows: The Early Years and Nosferatu,” a three-minute featurette on the digital restoration, lengthy excerpts from other eight other Murnau silent films, and a stills gallery.
