Joan Fontaine Centennial: Jane Eyre (1943)

Part two of our Joan Fontaine celebration. Here's Tim Brayton...

Joan Fontaine's reign at the top of the Hollywood pyramid was short and intense: three out of four movies made in three out of four years netted her Oscar nominations, with a win for the second, Suspicion. We come now to the film made immediately after this golden run: the second talkie adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic Jane Eyre, released in the United Kingdom at the very end of 1943, but held back from the U.S. until February, 1944.

By the time the film arrived at 20th Century Fox, it had already passed through the hands of super-producer David O. Selznick, who had assembled all of the main components in an apparent bid to replicate his Oscar-winning Rebecca. Fontaine appears once again as a delicate, innocent ingénue dropped into a rambling Gothic mansion where a bullying man falls in love with her, in a story whose horror-film atmosphere (courtesy, in both cases, of cinematographer George Barnes) could be given the gloss of prestige and class thanks to the material's literary origins. I will commit an act of grave apostasy by suggesting that Fontaine is better here than she was in that 1940 film; there's a certain toughness in her posture and facial expressions that hadn't much appeared in her screen acting prior to this, and which considerably deepens the "meek virgin" trope she's once again saddled with.

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What's Streaming from 1944?

Not too damn much, that's what! 

Whenever we prep for a Smackdown The Film Experience becomes newly alarmed at how scarce the availability of 20th century film titles actually is online. Streaming culture has somehow convinced people that everything you might ever want to see is easier to access than it's ever been. Alas, the further back in time you go, the less there is for your eyeballs as we move away from analog. Of course streaming is more convenient so we hope Hollywood will magically decide to make all their vaults available. We can dream!

Laura dear, I cannot stand these morons any longer. If you don't come with me this instant, I shall run amok.

But if you want to steep yourself in 1944 beyond the 5 films featured in the next Smackdown, here's what you can stream should you have any of these memberships...

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Young and Hungry Susan Hayward

HAYWARD CENTENNIAL FINALE

by Nathaniel R

Oscar buffs might be the only people who still regularly talk about Susan Hayward but her Oscar record was impressive enough to warrant that conversation. Five nominations with one win, all in the Best Actress category, is not nothing. In fact, her record is a match with Audrey Hepburn and Anne Bancroft and another Susan (Sarandon). But when I first got interested in Susan Hayward before I'd seen any of her films, what drew me in was the abundant hysteria within the posters, titles, and taglines for her movies. Or to quote Rupert Everett in My Best Friend's Wedding:

The misery. The exquisite tragedy. The Susan Hayward of it all!"

She lived (onscreen at least) for exclamation points so it's fitting then that her Oscar win came from I Want to Live! (1958). But to close out our celebration counterintuitively in reverse, let's end with a film from when Hayward was a young and hungry actress without much pull...

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Susan Hayward in "My Foolish Heart"

SUSAN HAYWARD CENTENNIAL WEEK

by Timothy Brayton

Yesterday, Eric did an extraordinary job of tackling Susan Hayward's performance in I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), which I think a lot of us might agree was her all-time best performance. Today, I'd like to offer up what I consider to be her most Susan Haywardiest performance: as the good girl-turned-wretched alcoholic in 1949's My Foolish Heart, the film that netted Hayward the second of her five Oscar nominations.

It's a story tailored with laser focus on letting the lead actress show off Everything with a capital "E"...

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The Furniture: My Gal Sal's Nonsense Gay Nineties

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. Here's Daniel Walber...

My Gal Sal is a pack of lies. The 1942 musical, ostensibly a biopic of songwriter Paul Dresser, is almost entirely fabricated. Of course, that hardly matters. Accuracy is no prerequisite for the Best Production Design Oscar, which Richard Day, Joseph C. Wright and Thomas Little won for the picture. No one will be mad if some details are fudged in musical numbers like “Me and My Fella and a Big Umbrella.”

That said, My Gal Sal is interesting because it’s all nonsense. It’s a window into the way Hollywood projects itself onto the past, a compendium of historical kitsch.

Dresser (Victor Mature) begins the film in a strict, Indiana home. His minister father objects to his music, so he runs away and gets a job with a medicine show. 

Eventually he meets Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), an established Broadway star. They don’t hit it off right away, but he meets her again in New York City. Their on-again-off-again romance, troubled by his sudden success, drives the rest of the plot...

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