Devotion (1946)

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt; produced by Robert Buckner

In the first half of the nineteenth century, in a village on the Yorkshire Moors, the three Brontë sisters live with their clergyman father (Montagu Love), aunt (Ethel Griffies) and brother. Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland), Emily (Ida Lupino) and Anne (Nancy Coleman) dream of being not just writers, but successful authors, while their brother, Branwell (Arthur Kennedy), has ambitions of becoming a lionised painter. Their sometimes tumultuous family and romantic relationships, and their passionate personalities, both fuel and hamper their destinies.

The Hollywood biographical movie, or ‘bio-pic’, has a chequered history. It can be rousing and entertaining, provide excellent opportunities for actors, and the chance for studios to produce what they see as ‘serious cinema’. Usually, however, the genre generates a film that is simplistic and inaccurate. Such is the case with Devotion.

The first half of the film I thought more like Little Women than a real attempt to re-create the Brontë family dynamics, with Charlotte as Jo, though rather less sympathetic; their father taking over from Marmee, and Branwell as a loutish Laurie. This is, of course, unfair to both the subject and to Little Women, but conveys the superficial approach of the story.

The script is better than the story at large, with good lines, especially as spoken by Branwell. Yet, though it follows, in general, the lives of the Brontës, it fleshes out the situation little more than it does their characters.

Charlotte is shown as a rather obtuse young woman, wrapped up almost entirely in herself, and whose insensitivity borders on arrogance. Emily is a loner, content with her moors and circumscribed world. Branwell offers nothing likeable; he is bitter – perhaps at the realisation that he doesn’t have much talent – who lurches between self-advertisement and self-loathing like the sot he is. Anne comes across as a cipher. Nor is there much learned about their father. Arthur Nicholls (Paul Henreid), the love-interest for both Charlotte and Emily, is said to have been educated abroad, perhaps to explain Henreid’s accent. Nicholls was educated in Ireland, which would not have been considered ‘abroad’ in the England of the 1840s. Other than this, though he has the most complex character, it is shown, rather than explored.

Much is made later in the film of Emily’s secret heart-ache that allowed her to write Wuthering Heights, implying that such experience is required for successful writing. (The ‘write about what you know’ school is not one with which I’ve ever agreed; if this policy were followed, genres such as historical fiction would not exist, nor would most mysteries or adventure stories.) Charlotte’s time in Belgium is suggested as paralleling Jane Eyre’s at Thornfield. But nothing is mentioned of what brought The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to life in Anne’s imagination. The examination of the Brontës’ talent is not deep.

The cast comprises talented performers, most of whom are miscast. De Havilland does well as Charlotte, but Lupino is all wrong as a lonely young Englishwoman from Yorkshire. Henreid is adequate as Nicholls but the character seems too modern; (this is made tangible in the movie’s poster, in which the actors are shown in 1940s attire). The best performance is given by Kennedy, but, ironically, he too is miscast. He could fill the sour-young-man rôle in his sleep, though, like Lupino, he is as convincing a product of an early Victorian rural vicarage as Colin Farrell was as an ancient Macedonian king in Alexander the Great (2004).

A bright spot in the casting is Sydney Greenstreet, as William Thackeray. But then, that man could have made a lump of stone seem witty and entertaining. Victor Francen (oddly, for movies of this era, a Belgian actor playing a Belgian character) provides some devilment as a school headmaster.

I know very little about the Brontës, aside from their works of fiction, and I feel that, after watching Devotion, I know no more. It’s not that the film doesn’t offer something about the family, however shallow, but that what it gives carries a synthetic and ungenuine feel. Even if true, the movie made it all seem unlikely.