Another Hike on the Moors for ‘Jane Eyre’ (Published 2011)

CARY FUKUNAGA, the director of the new movie version of “Jane Eyre,” which opens Friday, joked recently that there was an unwritten law requiring that “Jane Eyre” be remade every five years. It sometimes feels that way. Of all the classic 19th-century novels, Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” has been by far the most filmed, outstripping even the ever-durable “Pride and Prejudice.”

So far there have been at least 18 film versions, going back to a 1910 silent movie, and 9 made-for-television “Janes” — so many that they sometimes seem to quote from one another as much as from the novel. Several, including the current one, were even filmed on the same location: Haddon Hall, an ancient, battlemented manor house in wind-swept Derbyshire that gets pressed into service whenever British filmmakers need someplace old and dank looking.

So moviegoers may be forgiven if in recollection all the “Jane Eyres” seem to blend together in one continuous loop, with Joan Fontaine, the 1943 Jane, suddenly becoming colorized and morphing into Susannah York, while Rochester turns, like a character in a horror film, from Orson Welles into George C. Scott and then Timothy Dalton.

Certain moments occur over and over again: the stool at Lowood, the miserable boarding school for orphans; Rochester skidding and falling from his horse; the screams at night, the burning bed chamber; Jane running across the barren countryside; the voice calling her across the moors. And it always ends the same way: She marries him of course, though the movie Rochester is seldom the pitiable, damaged creature he proves to be in the book, where he loses both an eye and a hand.

If there has never been a definitive movie “Jane Eyre,” there has never been a truly rotten one. Even the sentimental 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version, with William Hurt embarrassingly miscast as a Rochester more nearly a mild eccentric than a brooding, Byronic type, has its moments. A couple of the movies have lingered a little on the sultry, Creole ancestry of Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, and on a theme of colonial exploitation, but so far the one truly ground-breaking version is John Duigan’s 1993 film of “Wide Sargasso Sea,” the Jean Rhys novel that tells the story from the point of view of Bertha, the madwoman locked in the attic.