Min sommar med Hitchcock

Dottern Patricia, Alma och Alfred Hitchcock.

Ingen sommar utan Hitchcock lovade jag för två somrar sedan, när jag började skriva denna blogg. Denna sommar är inget undantag, men jag har funderat ett bra tag på vilken film jag skulle skriva om. Det låg ju nära till hands att säga något om "Hitchcock", biofilmen som gick upp i vintras om Hitchcocks inspelning av "Psycho". Med Anthony Hopkins som Hitchcock och Helen Mirren som Alma Reville Hitchcock och Toni Collette i en rolig biroll som Hitchcocks sekreterare. 

Det finns en en annan ny film också, "The Girl" som handlar om Hitchcock besatthet med Tippi Hedren och inspelningen av "Fåglarna". Jag har inte sett den men Sienna Miller spelar Tippi Hedren. Anthony Hopkins spelar Hitchcock i den förstnämnda filmen, men i den filmen är det nog ändå kvinnorna som gör  "Hitchcock" och får något av en feministisk revansch. Helen Mirren förvandlar Alma Reville till en både vacker och glamorös yrkeskvinna som serverar Hitch hans bästa idéer till frukost eller lunch - som t.ex. idén att låta döda stjärnan Janet Leigh redan efter 30 minuter in i filmen "Psycho" - medan hon gömmer hans gåslever under grönsakerna i kylskåpet och låter honom hållas med sin morbida besatthet för vackra skådespelerskor. 

Filmen "Hitchcock" är märkligt nog en riktig mysrulle, en charmig komedi om en tjurig regissör som vill hitta tillbaka till sin ungdoms lekfulla experimentlusta. Filmen är inte ett dugg ruskig, vilket gör scenerna med den berömda duschscenen lite märkliga. Men kanske lyckas man faktiskt förmedla något av det kreativa lättsinne som var Hitchcocks och som skapade de otäcka scenerna när Marion Crane blir mördad. Scarlett Johansson gör en sympatisk och oväntat humoristisk Janet Leigh och Toni Collette, som sagt, har den bästa repliken.

Toni Collette, Anthony Hopkins och Helen Mirren

Men jag tittade inte på "Psycho". Trogen mitt nya projekt att lära mig mer om engelsk film, valde jag några av Hitchcocks äldre engelska filmer - och upptäckte något som får mig att rysa till lite: Jag har varit i Michael Balcons arbetsrum, producenten på Ealing Studio som i början av sin karriär också var den som producerade Hitchcocks första filmer. 

Som till exempel "Easy Virtue", "Olovlig kärlek" på svenska, från 1927. Det är en film som drivs av en kvinnlig protagonist, den berömda aktrisen Isabel Jeans, som är ungefär lika bortglömd i England idag som Pauline Brunius är i Sverige idag. Hon är mycket vackert klädd och vackert fotograferad i rollen som en societetsdam som gör skandal, skiljer sig och försöker hitta lyckan på nytt genom att gifta sig med en naiv ung man från landet. Jag fascinerades av hennes långa, vita armar, som påminde om ett par svanar - filmen handlar ju på sätt och vis om en vacker kvinnas svanesång.

Det var Hitchcocks femte film som regissör och det var den sista filmen som han gjorde för producenten Michael Balcons filmbolag Gainsborough. (De skulle återknyta sitt samarbete senare.) Jag vet inte hur ofta den här filmen visas - själv hade jag turen att hitta den på en dvd med den mer kända filmen "Blackmail". Men redan 1927 redan här kan man se att mycket av Hitchcocks teman och ledmotiv och man kan roa sig med att hitta ledtrådar till flera av hans senare filmer.  

I "Easy Virtue" finns idén med "the notorious woman" (ursprungligen från Noel Cowards pjäs), eller oskulden som hängs ut offentligt. Här finns det romantiska mötet på Rivieran, den tryckande stämningen i ett lantligt gods med en misstänksam och hämndlysten svärmor - allt detta påminner mig om "Rebecca". Och här finns skildringen av ett subtilt spel där vardagen med sina krav på både följsamhet och konvenans långsamt förvandlas till en mardröm - såsom i många senare Hitchcock-filmer. 

Isabel Jeans liljevita armar

Isabel Jeans var förresten gift med Claude Rains, som senare i "Notorious" försöker göra en hederlig kvinna av Ingrid Bergman, under ögonen på hans missunnsamma nazi-mor. 
I slutet av "Easy Virtue", när ryktena definitivt har krossat den vackra societetsdamen, yttrar Isabel Jeans en fantastisk replik, som Hitchcock påstod att han skämdes för, i intervjuboken med Francois Truffaut. Hon stiger fram ur mörkret och säger: "Shoot. There is nothing left to kill."

Det finns en senare filmversion av "Easy Virtue", gjord 2008. Jessica Biel spelar huvudrollen - hon som i filmen "Hitchcock" spelar Vera Miles. Hela ""Easy Virtue" från 1927 finns på Youtube.

Let's talk about Googie

Googie Withers and John McCallum in "It always rains on Sunday"

Who was she? Googie Withers: English movie star of the 1940:s, born 1917 in Karachi and died in Australia just a couple of years ago, in 2011. I had never heard of her before I started to do some research before our trip to London this summer. I was stunned to find out that I had completely missed this wonderful actress who disappeared to Australia with hr husband John McCallum, had a wonderful career over there as well as three kids, and when she wanted to come back to films, actually lost two leading film roles to Vivien Leigh in the 1960:s.

So who was she and how can I discover her today? It was easy enough to find information about her on the internet: I learned that Googie had a father who was a captain in the British army and a mother who was part Dutch, part French. Her real name was Georgette, Googie was actually a diminutive given to her by her amah during childhood in British India. Googie became a dancer in musicals during her teens and started appearing in films as a blonde during the 1930:s. She had a small part in Hitchcock's "The lady vanishes"(1938) - as one of Margaret Lockwood's two girlfriends at the beginning of the picture. But it was at Ealing Studios that she became a star in her own right and made her most memorable film: "It always rains on Sunday" from 1947.

In this wonderfully bleak melodrama, Googie plays a housewife in London's East End who suddenly, one ordinary, rainy Sunday, gets a visit from an old lover, who ended up in prison and now is an escaped convict. She helps him, hides him in her matrimonial bedroom, and gives him food, before he kisses her, knocks her out and leaves, with the police on his tail. There is a strikingly beautiful chase along the rail tracks of London's lost Canary Wharf before the man gets caught, while the poor housewife tries to commit suicide by gas, while her ten year old son sleeps in his bedroom a couple of doors away. The film ends with a touching scene when the husband, a nice man called George, sits by his wife's bedside and urges her to come home soon.

"It always rains on Sunday" is in many respects akin to other British more well known classics such as David Lean's "Brief Encounter", made the year before, and to Carol Reeds' two films about hunted men: "Odd Man Out" (1945) and "The Third Man". These films all share the same feeling for everyday life, love for ordinary people and detail, and have that certain quality that make them memorable through what at first seems banal and even simple. They all depict a feeling of sadness after the horrors of war, of great things lost, great expectations, true love or just the plain and simple love of thy neighbor - the very things that Harry Lime has learned to exploit.

"It always rains on Sunday" was directed by Robert Hamer, who after this film made one of the best comedies of the era: "Kind hearts and coronets". The script was signed Angus MacPhail who delivered many scripts for Ealing and together with a stellar cast they produced this beautiful film, a slice of life and a solid piece of melodrama filled with atmosphere from post-war London. Even if the story of the housewife and her lost love is at the centre of the film, carrying its emotional weight, there is a sense of balance, and also of faint hope for the future, in the portraits and relations between the other characters around the housewife Rose and her unlucky love Tommy Swan. What really made the Ealing films so special is the way they portray communities and people who share a life together, for better and for worse.

But let's talk about Googie: She wasn't tall, according to imd.com, but she looks tall. Maybe the fashionable shoulder pads and tall hair of the 1940:s helped, but she also has that graceful and queenlike stature that make her stand out. She isn't beautiful in the Hollywood sense with that tall forehead, those high, broad cheekbones, the big eyes and the big mouth. Everything looks big on Googie. Even her bare, snow white arms arms and legs look big - which she showed off a lot more in other movies, like "Dead of Night". She seems to have more in common, anyway, with the grand French actress Arletty than with the other beautiful brunettes of her day: Ava Gardner, Dorothy Lamour, Ingrid Bergman or even Vivien Leigh, with whom she shared and Indian past. She also has a mesmerizing voice, warm and articulate, velvety. What a pity Hitchcock never gave her a leading role.

In "It always rains on Sunday" Googie has several memorable moments, like the ones where she snaps at her family while she tries to decide what to do with the man hiding in the bomb shelter out in the back yard. She is mostly seen in the kitchen, where her husband has his bath in the middle of the room and her son and two step daughters (his daughters, from a previous marriage) go in and out. When Tommy the escaped convict is hiding in the bed room, she is running up and down the staircase and in one scene starts a violent fight with one of her step daughters, who insists on going into the bed room to get a hair brush. She even tears the daughters dress, like some evil step mother of Cinderella. There are also a flash back, done without any fuss, where we see Googie as the younger Rose, blonde and smiling as the bar maid of the local pub, where she meets Tommy. He asks her if she's doing anything on her free day, a Thursday, and she says "nothing" and he proposes that they do nothing together. Then we see the two of them lying on the grass with a beautiful view of the sea in the distance, and he gives her a ring - a ring that he later on won't even recognize.

Googie could have played queen Victoria, Elizabeth I, Florence Nightingale or Emmeline Pankhurst - why not? Now she didn't, at least not in films, and her most memorable movie roles are wives, tormented wives, and she does a very good job with that. In real life, she married John McCallum and left England for Australia in 1948. They continued working together, mainly in theatre, and remained married until he died in 2010. A year later, Googie died.

Robert Hamer had worked with Googie in her previous film, "The lives of Joanna Godden", where she actually met and fell in love with  John McCallum. I haven't found that film on dvd yet, unfortunately.  Hamer also directed Googie in the episode called "The Haunted Mirror" in "Dead of Night", the ghost story that Ealing Studios made in 1945. I saw that film the other day and although it didn't scare me as much as it had once when I saw it on TV a long time ago, the episode about the husband who goes temporarily mad from looking into a mirror that his wife has given him, was truly scary.

Catching a rat

Harry Lime caught in his own "limelight".

When Harry Lime walks into the picture, after a good long bit into Carol Reed's classic The Third Man, it is hard not to like him. After all, he is the writer Holly Martin's best childhood friend, and he is the man Anna Schwarz loves, the melancholy actress who is hiding under a false alias in the divided post war city of Vienna. Harry, dressed all in black, moves swiftly towards the camera, where Holly is standing, by the great Ferris wheel, and he smiles, greeting Holly as if he came to meet his at the airport. He is happy to see his friend again, and during their interview, inside the Ferris wheel, his face is at times clouded by suspicion, anger and perhaps even pure evil, but then he composes himself and lets through that boyish charm that has made Holly and Anna love him so. We know that Harry LImes is wanted for drug trafficking in the damaged old city, respnsible for thousands of people dying under horrible circumstances for having taken his penicillin dilluted with water. And he is most porbably also guilty of murdering the man that has been found in his coffin.

"Don't you know what's happened to your girl?" Holly asks Harry in an attempt to wake his conscience. Harry breezily brushes the question off, but later, like a regular Werther, he writes her name in the shape of a heart, on the misty windowpane. 
"I buried you" Holly says angrily, resenting both the deceit of his friend and the show he is putting on, trying once more to pull wool over his eyes.
But Harry only pats his chest, complaining of the assumed ulcer he's having trouble with, and points to the people down there, on the ground far below them:
"Victims? Don't be melodramatic.... Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?"

And then comes that crude reference to money, all the money you can make if you only can decide how many of those dots you could "spare", and finally, the brilliant coup de grâce: Harry compares the bloody times of the Borgias and how that produced the Renaissance, while five hundred years of democracy in Switzerland produced only the cucko clock.

I wonder how we would have perceived the stunning chase through the sewer's systems underneath Mozart's ailing city, and accepted Harry's death, if we hadn't heard that speech. Because it's hard not to like Harry, the way he casually drifts into the picture halfway through it, as if he didn't belive in how much we care. We're just like Holly, ready for an adventure and the help from a friend who we think is nice enough to be offering a job to someone who is broke. And we've seen Anna cry, the close up of her beautiful face, and we've seen her move around the rooms where they used to be together, opening drawers and absentmindedly combing her hair.

In a way, it lets us off the hook. In the end we want Holly to kill Harry. After all, he is nothing more than the lowest form of criminal, a man who makes money from letting children die, who has betrayed the woman who loves him and every bit of fibre in him that makes him human.

I leave the cinema where I have seen "The Third Man" stunned as always, Anton Kara's music haunting me while I stumble thorugh the darkness and snowy landscape, to find the bus that will take me home. There is a fourth character that really is just as important to the story as Harry, Holly or Anna. It is the city of Viennea, of course, and it shocks me how the city around me is so different from the monstrous wreck of a city that is a constant presence in Reed's movie. Vienna after the war is the ravaged mother who can't take care of her kids anymore. Her children have all become perverse, or insane, like in the Doors song.

Everything in Reed's film is in fact after the catastrophy. Holly is too late, not only for Harry's funeral, but for saving him. Anna is mourning the life she had with the nice and gentle Harry. Callaway, the British officer, who is trying to capture Harry, ias aldo too late. For the children in the hospital there is no remedy. It is probably there that Holly makes upp his mind. After that, there is not much left of the film, but time enough for Holly to chase Harry through the chillligly expressionistic tunnels under the city, like a buried past, and kill the man who lost his humanity.

"The Third Man" is about becoming inhuman in a time when resurrection is needed, and I ask myself the question: How come I still find Harry Lime such a lovable character, when he should have been the man who saved Anna, took care of all those kids and gave his old friend a job?

Sommarens Hitchcock

Joan Fontaine i permanent skräck.

Utanför vårt stora vardagsrumsfönster är träden i uppror. De kastar sig än hit, än dit, som om de uppförde en orolig dans, eller ålade sig undan en utlovad smärta. Eftersom vädret beter sig konstigt i år och blixten slog ned i en tall mitt emellan oss och grannen, och jag har ännu inte badat en endaste gång fast det redan är slutet av juli, ser jag på träden med viss oro. Sedan flyttar jag blicken tillbaka till teven, där en amerikansk serie om vänskap och kärlek - eller snarare den permanenta rädslan för bestående känslor och kärlek - pågår. Tryggare? Ja, faktiskt, det fejkade livet hos en grupp charmerande 30-plussare känns verkligare än min rädsla för att ett av de stora träden utanför vårt hus ska bestämma sig för att slå sig ner över oss.

Den irrationella rädslan är något jag känner igen sedan barndomen. Den fokuserades ofta i teverutan ute på somrarna på Karlsudd, hos mormor, där jag för första gången såg de flesta av Alfred Hitchcocks filmer. Men människan versus naturen var aldrig riktigt hans tema - det finns gott om andra filmskapare som ägnat sig åt det - förutom då Fåglarna. Fåglarna. Inte någon av mina favorit-Hitchcock direkt, mer som en pastisch över den egna stilen, med den fågelliknande Tippi Hedren som skärrad struttar genom det sömniga lilla kustsamhället Bodega Bay på sina eleganta höga klackar.

Fåglarna var den enda filmen som jag saknade på dvd och därför var det den enda filmen som jag köpte i butiken på British Film Institute i London, där det just nu pågår en stor retrospektiv av Hitchcocks alla filmer. Suck! Senare, när vi tittade på filmen hemma, i soffan framför det stora fönstret som många fåglar slagit emot, drabbades ingen i familjen av den välorkestrerade skräcken för irrationellt aggressiva fåglar. Det som slog mig mest var filmens serieliknande utseende och hur mycket av filmen som gick ut på att se Tippi Hedren stiga ut och in ur bilar, hus och så den famösa tagningen utanför skolan när hon sitter och röker medan kråkorna formerar sig till attack.

Så skräcken för att naturen slår tillbaka är inte riktigt gamle Hitchs melodi, tänker jag och fastnar istället för de mer intima landskapen som han var så mycket bättre på att demonisera. Som till exempel bilden av det lyckliga äktenskapet, den nygifta bruden som inser det ohyggliga, Joan Fontaines ansikte i stum skräck.

Jag läser lite på google och imdb om Joan Fontaine, som tydligen lever än, över 90 år gammal, någonstans i Kalifornien. För några år sedan hade hon en aktiv sida på Facebook där hon uppges ha svarat på brev från sina fans. Jag går genast dit bara för att upptäcka att rs Fontaine verkar ha lagt ner verksaheten. Lika bra det. Vad skulle jag ha skrivit? "I just love your work!" En sak vet jag ju sedan länge och det är att närkontakt med filmvärlden har aldrig bidragit positivt till min stora, omutbara och oföränderliga kärlek till film. Jag trivs bäst så här, bakom minst en skärm, med rätt att formulera min egna spegelbild. På andra sidan duken, eller skärmen, där jag sitter, blir Hitchcocks gåva till mig att alla hans skapelser blir mina.

Det är dock tydligt att Joan Fontaine verkar vara en ganska tröttsam person, lika oresonlig som sin syster, Olivia de Havilland, som jag ju också har ett livslångt förhållande till tack vare hennes roll som Melanie Hamilton i Borta med vinden. Olivia lever även hon, på närmare håll eftersom hon sedan 60 år är bosatt i Paris. För bara två år sedan fick hon motta en medalj från Nicholas Sarkozy och på en bild syns hennes oförstörda vackra profil, under en kaskad av sockervaddsvitt hår. Hennes syster närvarade inte. Jag läser ännu en gång den fascinerande historien om systrarna som aldrig kunde hålla sams. Jag vet att det är lite patetiskt, jag letar efter spår, ledtrådar och det finns ju faktiskt en, bortsett från den oresonliga skräck som vi delat både jag och Joan Fontaine: vi fyller nämligen år på samma dag.



Bergman's hidden demon

I have finally seen the movie that Ingmar Bergman didn't want us to see. During his life time, whenever there was a retrospectif of his films, this one was never shown. In Stockholm, there was a cinema called Fågel Blå where his films were screened continuously and in chronological order. But this partiular film from 1950 was never shown. In England it was called High Tension and in Germany the title was Menschenjagd. The Swedish title is much more to the point and its direct translation is: Stuff like that never happens here! What a ludicrous title for a film that has been denied its own existence.

Alf Kjellin, Ingmar Bergman and Signe Hasso.

It's a thriller about fugitives from the Baltic states being terrorised by Soviet agents and it features some of the best Swedish movie actors at the time: Ulf Palme, playing the evil spy Atkä Natas and Alf Kjellin as the heroic young police man, in love with the wrong woman. She in turn is played by Signe Hasso, one of the Swedish stars who left Sweden for an international career, and who was at the time living in Los Angeles and acting on the English stage.

The film has some of its most effective scenes in the streets of Stockholm: cars chasing up and down streets, harbours and peaceful suburbs. Especially the well known streets around Slussen and Mosebacke, where there is a beautiful old theatre and a famous out door elevator, Katarinahissen, are nicely used as dramatic scenery. There is a scene when Vera (Signe Hasso) goes to see her copariots who are having a secret meeting behind a movie screen where there is an animated feature being shown, with Donald Duck. The scene reminds me of a similar scene in Hitchcock's Sabotage, the one with the animated film about little Cock Robin being killed... And the creepy scene where Atkä Natas is chased into a corner, up on the bridge beteween the Katarinahissen and Mosebacke square, and jumps to his death, falling into a cluster of bikes on the ground at Slussen, reminds me also of Hitchcock.

There is even a rather amusing scene between Natas and the policeman Almkvist, where a gun travels between them, like a prize for the most eloquent, that reminds me of the constant balancing in Hitchcock's film between tragedy and comedy. It's no coincidence, of course. Bergman studied his competition closely and forged his own cinematography accordingly. High Tension - or "Stuff like that doesn't happen here" is not a bad movie. But it's not a typical Bergman movie either. It has its slow moments and perhaps rather weird twists in the story line - but it is a thriller, and gives a rather poignant picture of the lives of fugitives in neutral countries after the war. The end comes very close to Hitchcock's Notorious, with the woman who was bad being carried away to safety by the man who loves her.

Maybe Bergman thought that it wasn't original enough. He probably disliked it because it didn't live up to his expectations. But does it really matter what the film's director thought? The film works and has a life of its own - regardless of initial intentions and ambitions. I'm inclined to let High Tension live, and crawl out of the closet.

It's touching and it has its great visual moments, mostly due to the brilliant cinematography of Gunnar Fischer. And Ulf Palme is a great villain. It's amazing how Ulf Palme in just over one year would deliver three very different character portraits for the sceen: In Flicka och hyacinter by Hasse Ekman he plays a rather naive writer, trying to understand why a young woman has killed herself. In Fröken Julie by Alf Sjöberg, he acts out the battles between class and sex between Jean, the butler that he plays, and Julie, the high strung upper class lady played by Anita Björk. And in High Tension by Ingmar Bergman, he plays the spy and war criminal Atkä Natas (= Real Satan) who has come in from the cold and wants to surrender to the United States. Ulf Palme was a very sensitive actor who could play on his tenderness and beautiful melodic voice to appear threatening, or just plain weary of life. For his sake, at least, this movie should be seen.

Ulf Palme as Atkä Natas

Jane Eyre revisited, part 2

Mia Wasikowska as the 12th Jane.

There is no broken veil scene in Cary Fukunaga's version of Jane Eyre. On the extra material on the dvd, the scene is there, sure enough, beautiful and haunting, making a clear connection between the genre of the gothic novel that Jane Eyre both belongs to, and moves away from, and also showing us the first Mrs Rochester in all her despair: She was once too, a hopeful bride...

In the final film, we don't see her, the woman that Mr Rochester has hidden away in the attic, with the feeble excuse that at least, he didn't send her to an asylum (but is that place really any better?), until after the broken wedding, when it is made clear that Mr Rochester cannot marry Jane. Berta Mason Rochester is still a beautiful woman, but wild and dangerous, and that is why she has to be locked up and hidden from the world.

Does Jane realize, at that moment when she finally sees the first Mrs Rochester, that she could be treated the same way, if she doesn't behave? Or maybe, I hope, she thinks that she has already been there, and survived. She has spent eight years in a school for girls that was very much like a prison. Or a purgatory. And she survived it, making her strong enough to survive anything else that might be just as difficult.

The word "difficult" makes me stop for a moment. I heard it yesterday, in a very different kind of film, although it too was about women surviving in a man's world. (Ok, that was very broad - what film isn't?) The film was the Sarah Jessica Parker-movie called I don't know how she does it. It was a really sweet film about a career woman played by Parker who juggles career and private life with a sweet husband and two sweet kids, a boss who doesn't care about family, co-workers who either are trying hard to be dicks or robots, and a new collegue, played by Pierce Brosnan, who sees all the right possibilities in Parker's lovable and capable character. It's really a great little film for its focus on hope to all women out there in the audience: Yes, it is possible to love your work and love your family!

Sarah Jessica Parker gets friendly advice.

Well, there is a friend in there, who is a redhead and single mum, who talks to the camera, giving us the clues that we might not get if we were not told about them. And one of the things she says is that being "difficult" is something that has to be avoided at all costs, as being difficult is being everything that is not a "man". It's a bit corny but it works. I loved that movie.

Sadly but evidently, we are still much in the hands of the males controlling everything, and if we want to play with them, we have to make sure we appeal to them.

Jane makes an impression on the disturbed Mr Rochester because she is not afraid. She even says it, straight to his face, on one of their first encounters. (On their very first one, she shows it, when Mr Rochester nearly runs her over with his horse.) Still, everything about Mr Rochester is frightening, and she knows it. Why does she fall in love with him? That is something that has always intrigued me. In the now classic analysis of the gothic romance story, there is the idea of the woman saving the man with her love. But from what? And does he really deserve her love?

In this film, there is a moment when one almost hopes that things will take another turn, when the nice Mr St John asks Jane to follow him to India, as his wife. Her answer is almost fierce, as if she was mad at him for asking. She insists on calling him a brother, nothing else. He suggests love may not be between them but that it will come, after they're wed. This upsets her even more. Jane is really the faithful type, the one who gives her heart once, and never more. So she has to wait for Rochester and luckily for her, Bertha decides she has to end it all - to make way for Jane? And Rochester turns blind, which will probably milden his manner and make him a more humble husband to Jane.

Jane Eyre saying no.

As I said, this film eludes the famous veil scene, but in return does marvels with other unexpected things, that I haven't seen in other film versions. For instance, there is the scene by the window, which I don't remember from the book and might have the script writer Moira Buffini to thank for its existance. Jane is standing by one of Thornfield's windows, and Mrs Faifax comes to remind her that tea is ready:

”I am not in need of tea, thank you” says Jane, rather rudely. But Mrs Fairfax is not easily put off. Maybe she has even been there herself, staring out of the windows of Thornfield Hall. She is after all a relation to Mr Rochester.

The windows are large, small panes of glass inside heavy frames. Outside, the sun is setting. Mrs Fairfax says:

”It’s a quiet life here, isn’t it? … This isolated house. A still doom for a young woman."

Jane looks irritated, as if she doesn't agree. She answers her with quiet rebellion:

“I wish a woman could have action, like a man. It agitates me to pain that the skyline over there is over our limit. I long somtimes for a power of vision that would overpass it. If I could behold all I imagine… I’ve never seen a city. I’ve never spoken with men and I fear my whole life will pass.

Jane turns and faces Mrs Fairfax, who answers without malice:

"Now, exercise and fresh air…"

This scene comes directly after a series of pictures showing Jane tutoring Adèle. They are in a big library. Jane and Adéle in deep concentration, pressing flowers, bent over an atlas, discovering the world together. Then they sit together on the floor, bent over a large book with a magnifying glass. Jane is telling Adéle about some kind of demon in animal form. Adéle gets scared, and Jane, dead pan, just says "It's just a story". Then Adèle tells Jane a story: about the woman who lurks around the house after dark. She stands with her back to a large doll house, where we can clearly see a doll with black hair, staring out of one of the windows. Adèle is embellishing her story now, making the woman look like Snow White, a Snow White with fangs, like a vampire.

”What nonsense” says Jane, who, as we know, is not easily scared.

Then the camera pans delicately past a church yard. We're watching Thornfield Hall from a distance, from the home of the dead, crosses seen close up. Then we're back inside, with Jane, looking out at the vast and lonely landscape, and wondering how her life would have been, if she had been a man. And there is the scene with Mrs Fairfax.

A woman is doomed to a life inside houses. She can be a wife, a house keeper or a governess, but she will always have to live inside a house, like a prisoner. This scene also reminds me of other scenes where women are being trapped by window panes. One is Jane Wyman in Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession.  

But maybe I can offer a slightly different view: For the first time in her life, Jane is free to do what she likes inside a house. She can explore it, use its books, and she is being treated with kindness and respect. When she is ready, she is let out, to start exploring the world. That is when the scene with Mrs Fairfax appears in the film, and it is Mrs Fairfax who suggests that she takes a walk, taking the letters to the mail. And that is when she meets Mr Rochester for the first time. And Jane, who has been battling her fears all her life, finally stands in front of her life's biggest challenge: a man who frightens her but who loves her.

I think this film version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is rather wonderful. Don't you? 

Judi Dench showing the way.

Jane Eyre revisited

Jane Eyre entering the tall, dark house.



"Last night I dreamed I was back at Manderley again..." That is such a great line, and  I've always wanted to use it. It draws on the memory of long lost houses, lost in the cobwebs of time, but still there, waiting, ready to haunt us... It's like a dream I had for many years, when I was constantly getting lost and finding myself in huge, dark  and dreary places. It's not very unusual. Don't we all know a house like Manderley, strange and frightening, and yet so intimate and familiar? Yes, of course, it's very Freudian. But I've always loved the way the way Joan Fontaine reads the line, in the beginning of Hitchcock's Rebecca, while the camera creeps through the shrubs and weeds of a forsaken garden, with her soft melodious voice. It's is both wonderful and scary.

Actually, I was going to write about Jane Eyre, and about the new film version of Charlotte Brontë's famous novel, which I fins very enchanting. The new film version has a script by Moira Buffini and is directed by Cary Fukunaga and Mia Wasikowska plays Jane Eyre to Michael Fessbender's Mr Rochester. The film also has a good part for Judi Dench, who plays an unusually interesting Mrs Fairfax, and there is a scene by the windows of Thornfield Hall,when she talks to Jane, that most certainly will haunt me for a long time. And there is a lot to be said about this beautiful film version as well. If you'll bear withe me, I'll get there.

Joan Fontaine och Laurence Olivier i Rebecca.

So why do I start with a line that has nothing to do with Jane Eyre? Well, Hitchcock's Rebecca was made after a novel by Daphne du Maurier, and it is a very obvious homage to Brontê's famous novel. The line from Rebecca just shows how Charlotte Brontë's heroine continue to live through the ages. She always seems to have something urgent to tell us, in our own time. And there are so many of us who keep coming back to Thornton Hall or Manderely, seeking for something tha we know is both lost and found. The spirit of Jane is always there, hovering over us with her clear "I". We need her and we can't get enough of her. That is why we by now can count to 12 film- or tv versions made from the novel about her. 

What is she telling us, this plain and young governess of 18 years, who survived both a cruel stepmother and a horrible institution like the Lowood school for young girls - only to fall in love with a man who is just as hard, brutal and commanding as the life she is trying so hard to leave behind? Here's my story.

The first time I met Jane Eyre was on the screen, in the early seventies. It was the film version with Susannah York as Jane Eyre and George C. Scott as Mr Rochester. I saw it in a cinema in Malta. I was nine. It was very scary and not surprisingly, it was the scene where Mr Rochester's first wife, Bertha, tore up Jane's bridal veil, that made the deepest impression on me. I was always scared of the dark as a child and I kept thinking that when I closed my eyes before going to sleep, strange creatures would appear to live around my bed, so if I suddenly opened them I'd see the most horrible things...

Mother should never have let me see that film. Later, I remember that Sister White, at our school, The Covent of the Sacred Heart, in S:t Julian's, was a bit surprised when mother announced that my sister and I were reading Jane Eyre. Were we not a little too young for that kind of novel, she asked? Mum assured her we weren't, but I think it was probably the Ladybug version that we actually read.

A few years later, my mother and I went to a book fair at Skansen, the out door museum in Stockholm, and I bought my most cherished copy of Jane Eyre. It was published in 1946 in USA to comemorate the centennial of the novel. With this edition came strange and beautiful illustrations by Nell Booker, an artist from North Carolina. Jane Eyre was her first comission as a book illustrator. She later did the illustrations for Wuthering Heights as well. The pictures were in color and in black and white, they looked as if they had just left the hand of the artist, there was something fleeting and swift about them, a clear spring breeze flew through them.

I remember very clearly that summer afternoon at Skansen when I got the book and I've loved it ever since, keeping it close through the years, showing it with pride to my daughters.
Today, I can see that Nell Booker's pictures recall the Hollywood film version with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Yes, her again. She played both the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, and a few years later, Jane Eyre. Incidentally, she and I share the same birthday: October 22nd.

And that's a great line to end with. For now. But I'm sure I'll be back at Thornton Hall soon again.