Devotion: A Biographical Misfire

Ida Lupino as Emily Bronte.

With a top-flight cast, rich source material, and high production values, Devotion (1946) has all the makings of a classic film biography of the Bronte sisters. And yet, when "The End" finally flashed on the screen, all I could do was ponder how things went so terribly wrong. It's not a dreadful movie, mind you--but it's inaccurate, inconsiderate, and empty.

The inaccuracy is nothing new when it comes to film biographies. There are plenty of biographies that take dramatic license with real events. Devotion imagines that Charlotte Bronte (Olivia de Havilland) and her sister Emily (Ida Lupino) fell in love with the same man, a curate (Paul Henreid) who worked for their father. Each sibling pours their passion into their novels and the results are Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. 

According to most accounts, real life featured less emotional turmoil and more interesting people. There was no love triangle. Emily never married; in fact, there is no indication of any romantic relationship in her life. Wuthering Heights was the product of her literary imagination. She and Charlotte were not close (the latter was eight years older); Emily felt a more kindred connection with her younger sister Anne. Keith Winter's screenplay does get some things right: brother Bramwell was an alcoholic; the sisters attended a school in Belgium; and Jane Eyre was a contemporary popular success while Wuthering Heights was not.

Olivia de Havilland as Charlotte.

The inaccuracies in Devotion, though, are less offensive than the film's inconsiderate treatment of its audience. The filmmakers seem to assume that the audience can't handle a serious portrait of the Bronte sisters' lives. The first half of Devotion unfolds like an adaptation of Little Women with the sisters and their brother frolicking on the moors and Charlotte developing a schoolgirl crush on her headmaster. Just as Ida Lupino, who provides some much-needed gravitas, finally steers the film in the right direction, Emily is relegated to the background as Charlotte becomes a London celebrity. From there, Devotion limps to its conclusion.

There are small pleasures to enjoy along the way, in particular Erich Wolfgang Korngold's rich music score and Ernest Haller's atmospheric cinematography. There is almost a quaint charm about the stagey "B" movie sets that are supposed to be the moors. Yet, nothing can save Devotion from its fate as a subpar biography dressed up like a Warner Bros. "A" production.

Although completed in 1944, Devotion was not released until two years later--a rare practice in the 1940s. Some historians believe that the delay was related to Olivia de Havilland's landmark lawsuit against Warner Bros. that resulted in the creation of the De Havilland Law.