DEVOTION was a Warner Brothers film purporting to tell the story of the Bronte sisters, portrayed by Ida Lupino and Olivia de Havilland. Paul Henreid was the love interest, an English curate with an inexplicable Germanic accent. Arthur Kennedy played the drunken Bronte brother and Sydney Greenstreet portrayed writer William Makepeace Thackeray. The two leads were on the outs with the studio. Lupino objected to the studio treating her as "the poor man's Bette Davis," expecting her to take roles that Davis had turned down. DeHavilland had left Warner after winning a landmark decision against the company. This movie had sat on the shelf for three years.
The critics castigated the film for its liberties and simplifications with the sisters' lives. Bosley Crowther, reviewer for The New York Times, accused the filmmakers of turning a fascinating real life story into “Little Women.” A year-end roundup by the Times film editor, Thomas M. Pryor, included the movie among the seven biggest disappointments of the year. James Agee dismissed it in Time as “a three-year-old strip of damp bark off Warners' wartime backlog,” not exactly terrible, in fact better than most, but too “literary” and “vapid,” and a squandered opportunity to tell an interesting story. John McCarten of The New Yorker, says that he was no expert on the sisters but “I’m willing to bet that the Yorkshire ladies were not so excessively simple-minded as they’re made to be in this costume drama,” adding that “the girls talk in the toniest style you’ve ever heard.” Here is the trailer at TMC, which presents the life of the Bronte sisters as similar to "Wuthering Heights," filled with rainswept moors and unbridled romantic passion.
Curtis Bernhardt was a Warner Brothers workhorse who specialized in women's pictures, a Warner staple. He also helmed “My Reputation” a Barbara Stanwyck vehicle playing at this time at the neighborhoods, and “A Stolen Life,” a Bette Davis weepie due to open later that month.
Devotion” was playing at the Strand, a 2750 seat theater built in 1914 and said to be the first of the movie palaces. Louis Prima and his swing band provided the live entertainment that week, somewhat incongrously considering the feature. According to Variety, Prima "expends more energy than can be gotten in a truck-load of vitamins" and he and his vocalists brought out the screams "from the juveniles." Joe and Jane McKenna, a brother and sister knockabout comedy act, and tap dancer Evelyn Farney, whose low cut, short-skirted outfit drew the reviewer’s attention, rounded out the bill.
In the Sunday Times of April 7, Bosley Crowther took note of the plethora of costume dramas like "Devotion" playing in the city. A number of them, like "Devotion,"“Saratoga Trunk” and “Kitty.” had been sitting on the studio shelves for some time. He speculated that the studios had made these films during the war as reliable commodities because of uncertainty about the direction in which society would be headed in the immediate postwar period. Notably missing from screens in April 1946 were the war pictures that had been a staple a few months earlier.