Devotion is a 1946 American biographical film directed by Curtis Bernhardt and starring Ida Lupino, Paul Henreid, Olivia de Havilland, and Sydney Greenstreet.
Based on a story by Theodore Reeves, the film is a highly fictionalized account of the lives of the Brontë sisters.
They intend to give part of their governess income to their talented brother Branwell, so he can go to London and study art, to become a great temperamental painter.
One night when Bran is getting drunk at a local tavern, a man named Arthur Nicholls, his father's new curate, arrives.
They go on walks together, and one day Emily shows Arthur a lonely house on a hill, the one that inspired her writing her novel, Wuthering Heights.
Before long Charlotte admits to Emily that she has received unwelcome attentions while she was a governess and that after she returned home, Arthur kissed her.
Eventually the sisters learn that Arthur bought the painting that financed their trip to Europe, and Emily insists that they should repay him.
[1] Devotion was filmed between November 11, 1942 and mid-February 1943, but its screening was delayed until April 5, 1946 at the Strand Theater in Manhattan, due to a lawsuit by Olivia de Havilland against Warner Brothers.
[2] Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times: “The Warners have simplified matters to an almost irreducible extreme and have found an explanation for the Brontës in Louisa May Alcott terms.
They have visioned sombrous Emily, the author of Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte, the writer of Jane Eyre, as a couple of 'little women' with a gift."