Words on the printed page captivate us so completely that it’s natural to assume that the lives of writers must be rich, full of incident, and very dramatic indeed. Surely that is sometimes the case. Who among us could keep up with a Byron or a Pushkin or a Poe?
Yet even with the most outlandish writers, Hollywood, for some reason, often feels the need to fabricate. How else to explain “Devotion” (1943), Warner Brothers’ salute to the Brontës? Then again, the temptation must be strong to characterize the sisters who penned “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” as tortured Romantics.
Ida Lupino plays Emily, the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff, and Olivia de Havilland, Charlotte, who conceived Jane and Rochester. Nancy Coleman is their sister Anne, who wrote “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” and Arthur Kennedy, their dissolute brother Branwell. The film also features Sidney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray, Paul Henreid as an Irish priest, and – well, you get the idea. The casting, at times, strains credibility.
However, the music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold is up to the composer’s usual high standard. Korngold himself became so enamored of one of its themes that he recycled it for use in the first movement of his Violin Concerto.
The behind-the-scenes drama on “Devotion” is nearly as colorful as anything that made it to the screen. De Havilland had originally been cast to play Emily, and her real-life sister, Joan Fontaine, was to play Charlotte. De Havilland and Fontaine had an uneasy relationship, at best, their entire lives. At times they competed for the same men (Howard Hughes) and the same roles (Melanie in “Gone With the Wind” and the “second Mrs. De Winter” in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca”). In 1942, they were both in contention for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Fontaine won. De Havilland wouldn’t win her first Oscar until 1946. To say that the two were competitive is putting it mildly.
Fortunately for everyone on the set, an offer had come through for Fontaine to play Charlotte Brontë’s most famous creation, Jane Eyre, opposite Orson Welles’ Rochester, over at 20th Century Fox. So De Havilland assumed the part vacated by Fontaine.
After shooting wrapped, “Devotion” actually sat on the shelf for three years, as De Havilland successfully sued Warner Brothers to terminate her contract without her having to make up the six months she had been kept on “suspension.” Until then, actors under contract to the major studios had been considered suspended between jobs, thereby extending their obligation to their employers, so that, for instance, a seven year contract was spread out over a much longer period, fulfilled only during the time an actor was actually working. The legal victory became informally known as the De Havilland Law.
In addition to Korngold’s take on the Brontës, we’ll have music from movies inspired by Iris Murdoch (“Iris,” with music by James Horner), the Bard of Avon (“Shakespeare in Love,” with an Academy Award-winning score by Stephen Warbeck), and Samuel Clemens (“The Adventures of Mark Twain,” by Max Steiner).
I hope you’ll join me for real-life writers who appeared as characters in the movies, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network at wwfm.org.
