DEVOTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 386, 15 November 1946, Page 32

DEVOTION

| (Warner Bros.)

HIS film is an important event in the world of literature as well as of the cinema; or rather, it would be if it bore anything more

|than a merely superficial relation to. fact, since it solves the mystery, which has puzzled biographers and critics for 100 years, of how the secluded daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman named

Bronté were able to write such remarkable novels as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Shirley, and why Wuthering Heights is a more intense and powerful work than the others. The reason is that Emily and Charlotte Bronté were both in love with the same man, their father’s curate, but Emily’s passion went unrequited. Until now, it would appear, the only pérson who had held the key to this fascinating literary secret was the

Bronté sisters’ dissolute brother, Branwell. It came to him on his death-bed when, after reading Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and drinking a bottle of brandy, he confided to Emily, "Of course it is clear that you are both in love with the same man, only I don’t suppose anyone but your discerning brother will ever notice." I do not know what stimulants produced in the Messrs. Warner Bros. of Hollywood the necessary state of illumination one hundred years later; but how fortunate we are that they were discerning enough! It is so comforting when everything, even a writer’s afflatus and style can be reduced to the nice, simple formula of LOVE and the Eternal Triangle. But, though we should be used to such behaviour by now, it is also a little disconcerting when one finds a movie studio as irresponsible as is the case in Devotion. Whatever the title ‘Means, it isn’t devotion to truth. I shall not go over the pros and cons of the old argument about authenticity versus dramatic license and the box-office; but shall confine myself to observing that, from an educational point of view, Devotion is about as pernicious as any film could be, since — apart from the major stupidity I have mentioned-it reduces Charlotte Bronté (as played by Olivia de Havilland) to the stature of a cute little man-mad hussy, and will fix in the minds of almost all who see it an almost equally gross misconception of the character of Emily (Ida Lupino) and of the life led by the three Bronté sisters (Anne, played by Nancy Coleman, "is the third, but is so colourless as to be almost unnoticeable). aK a %* RUE, there is the admission in the film that Wuthering Heights is a greater novel than Jane Eyre; but we have to take Thackeray’s word for this, and no real evidence is produced to support the claim. On the contrary, the circumstances which we are now likely to remember as chiefly influencing the creation of one of the world’s literary masterpieces-in addition, of course, to the unrequited love motif — are that Emily used to go gallivanting round the moors in the rain, spent hours in contemplation of a ruin on the skyline which she called "Wuthering Heights," and had a recurrent nightmare about a grim rider on a black horse who galloped out of the night upon her. On this last point, I think Emily must have been guilty of some curious kind of sub-con-scious plagiarism; surely that darkcloaked horseman touch comes out of Mr. Orson Welles’s screen version of Jane Eyre by Sister Charlotte? Branwell, the spoilt, erratic, brandyguzzling brother who causes many of the heartaches and some of the inspiration around the vicarage at Haworth, is closer to history than most of the other people in the story; and perhaps for this reason Arthur Kennedy is able, in spite of the theatricalism of the role, to convey something of the tortured frustra-. tion of the young man. For some reason best known to themselves or the boxoffice, the Messrs. Warner have chosen a Frenchman to play the role of the English curate, Arthur Nicholls, who stimulated the literary genius of the Misses Bronté, and actually married Charlotte (after Emily had died of unrequited passion combined with influenza). In this role M. Paul Henreid is handsome, dashing, and doubtless as impeccable in the performance of his(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) religious duties as of his social ones (though we never see him at them), but nobody is likely to be taken in by the explanation that his foreign accent is due to his having been "educated abroad." And one may equally question, on practical grounds, the generous gesture whereby Mr. Nicholls _ secretly purchases one of Branwell’s paintings, Paying a high enough price to enable Emily and Charlotte to go to a finish-ing-school in Brussels. % * 5 REGARDED purely as entertainment, which is clearly how its producers would like us to regard it, Devotion scores not much higher than as education. Admittedly, the settings are alternately pretty and pretentious, and the dialogue is quite high-sounding (even including, unless my ears deceived me, such quaint Victorian expressions as "pansy," "eyewash," and "do his stuff"). A few of the characters"acqitire a certain validity through good acting. Arthur Kennedy’s performance as Branwell I have already mentioned; and in addition there are Ida Lupino, who is such a good actress that she makes Emily quite a vital person in spite of the script, and Sidney Greenstreet who contributes a robust sketch of Thackeray to the picture. In fact, what with the Brontés, Thackeray, a chance meeting with Dickens, and a visit to the "Cheshire Cheese," it is all very cosy in a literary way, enabling us to rub shoulders casually with the great; but while it may be true, as the foreword states, that the Bronté sisters "lived a story as rare and remarkable as any they dreamed," I doubt if "rare and remarkable" are the proper adjectives to apply to this film -except, of course, in an ironical sense.