Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Other Movies Based on 19th Century Novels

As we finish up our unit on novels and life writing, I thought that I'd show some movies based on canonical 19th century novels.  These movies will make for an interesting bridge between Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter.

The picture above is from the 1944 Jane Eyre starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles.  The link below is to a review of the DVD of this movie.  I like that it focuses on both the book and the movie, putting both in context.  By the way, one of the screenwriters for this movie was Aldous Huxley, an important novelist in his own right.

http://www.dvdtown.com/reviews/jane-eyre/4599

Here is the IMDB page for this movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036969/

Here British journalist Tanya Gold explains the appeal of Jane Eyre:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=407404&in_page_id=1879
 The picture below is from the most recent version of Jane Eyre:

In 1996, Franco Zeffirelli directed a theatrically-released version of Jane Eyre starring Charlotte Gainsborough and William Hurt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116684/

Below is a poster from the 1999 version of David Copperfield that we will see in class.

Although this poster dates from the 1970s (it is colorized), it is a great picture of the 1935 version of David Copperfield with W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber.
For more information about the novel David Copperfield, see this page by David A. Perdue:

http://charlesdickenspage.com/copperfield.html

PBS' site for the 1999 David Copperfield is here. 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/index.html

Interviews with the director and the screenwriter respectively are below:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/ei_curtis.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/ei_hodges.html

If you are more visually oriented, you may enjoy this article:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/notes.html

Bleak House is my favorite novel by Dickens:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/bleakhouse/index.html

However, I mustn't neglect Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (who hated each other):

Or the recent remake of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

But, as I've said in class, one often neglects the fact that people other than the British were writing novels and that movies were made of these novels.

See this link for Roger Ebert's review of Cousin Bette, a 1998 film based on one of Balzac's novels:  http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980612/REVIEWS/806120303/1023

You may find Cousin Bette to be more interesting as it details a forty-something woman's revenge on her family and the man who refused to marry her:

This year Jacques Rivette directed an adaptation of Balzac's novella, The Duchess of Langaise.  However, it was not well-received, and it left the E Street Cinema pretty quickly.

http://www.observer.com/2008/balzac-book-goes-bust-big-screen-atrocities-africa

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08102/872313-42.stm

In 1993, French director Claude Berri made a movie based on Emile Zola's novel Germinal:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107002/



I am surprised that I did *not* see this movie as one of my friends back in the day had liked Zola's novel.  The picture above is a scene from that movie. 

Every so often someone does a film version of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther

http://www.the-sorrows-of-young-werther.com/index2.html

And then there is Tolstoy's War and Peace:

http://www.artdish.com/ubbcgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=39&t=000327

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid53137.aspx

Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda starred in a Hollywood version of War and Peace.