GC Film Series - Spring 2001
Portrait of Jennie ('49)
In this fantasy-drama, a struggling New York artist meets and comes to love an otherworldly young
girl who inspires him. He seeks to find out who she is, where she came from, and to make use of
the inspiration she has given him.
NOTE: If you do not wish to have certain elements of the plot revealed, please wait to read these until after you have seen the film!
I. [From Luther Wright (www.videoflicks.com)]:
Portrait of Jennie is one of the most hauntingly romantic films I can recall ever watching. The stunning black & white cinematography often emulates the surface of the artist's canvas, while the music score weaves a tender, other-worldly tapestry of its own. Jennifer Jones is perfectly cast as the lovely, yet strangely sad and from-another-time Jennie Appleton. Joseph Cotten draws the viewer's sympathy as the struggling, starving artist, Eben Adams. Ethel Barrymore's portrayal of Adams' friend and mentor, Miss Spinney, adds strength to the film, and the first lady of the American film, Lillian Gish, offers Adams gentle and comforting grace as Sister Mary of Mercy. The film's final, stunning touch is the framed portrait of Jennie, revealed in gorgeous, glorious Technicolor, over which Jennie's voice is heard to repeat words spoken earlier to Eben Adams.... "Oh! Eben! Is it really me? I think some day it will hang in a great museum, and that it will make you famous!" This movie is a must-see for anyone who has felt the emptiness and lonliness of being a star-crossed lover. "From world's end to world's end there is only one true love, one you must search for until you find them..."
II. [From Brian Koller (http://briankoller.epinions.com)]:
Jennifer Jones became a star in 1943, with her leading role in The Song of Bernadette. Her performance captured the attention of film mogul David O. Selznick. He would eventually produce seven films starring the lovely, ethereal Jones. The Portrait of Jennie was the last film they would make together before their marriage in 1949. Joseph Cotten plays Eben, a poverty-stricken painter struggling to find commissions during the Great Depression. His only friend is kindly cab driver Gus (David Wayne). Eben tries to sell his drawings to an art gallery controlled by Miss Spinney (Ethel Barrymore), but is told that his work is mediocre. Nonetheless, Spinney takes a maternal interest in him, especially after she sees a drawing that he made of a radiant girl that he met in the park. Eben has subsequent encounters with the girl, whose name is Jennie (Jennifer Jones). Jennie is sweet but acts strangely, as if she belongs to another era. Eben is fascinated with her, and she provides the inspiration that is lacking in his work. But the more he learns about her, the more obvious it becomes that she is a spirit, seen only by him. Look for silent film star Lillian Gish in a small supporting role as the head of a convent.
Most of the film is photographed in black and white. However, the final shot, that of the finished portrait of Jennie, is in technicolor. This technique was also used in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which was only in color when the title subject was on camera. One of Eben's specialties was landscapes. Often, there are scene-opening shots in the film that resemble his paintings. On several occasions, a filter is used for the camera that makes it look like we are seeing a moving painting on canvas. For his efforts, Joseph August received an Oscar nomination for Best B&W Cinematography. But the Academy Award that was given to The Portrait of Jennie was for its special effects. The climactic scene takes place during a heavy storm, on a rocky seashore facing a lighthouse. The storm is very impressive, especially as it was done in an era before computer animated wizardry.
...[T]he chemistry between Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones is present, as always. They would make five films together, most of them with Selznick as producer. Cotten's gentle weariness is complimented by Jones' childlike, strangely luminescent screen presence. Selznick's meticulous efforts as a producer were legendary, and were again rewarded by the quality of the casting, performances, and screenplay. Selznick would again cast Cotten as the leading man the following year in one of his greatest films, The Third Man.
III. [From The Great Romantic Films by Lawrence J. Quirk (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974)]:
"An ageless love can cross frontiers of time and death, and neither time nor space need be a barrier to those who refuse to find them so. . . ." This expresses the essential philosophy of the David 0. Selznick production, Portrait of Jennie, an affecting study of a supernatural romance that showcased Jennifer Jones at her most ethereal and gave Joseph Cotten one of his more winning characterizations.
William Dieterle directed this tasteful film, shot in 1947 on location in New York and New England, and released in early 1949. Based on the delicate mood-piece novella "Portrait of Jennie," by Robert Nathan, published in 1940, it deals with a young New York painter (Cotten), down on his luck in the Depression year 1932, who despairs because his work lacks depth and pictorial allusiveness. He is encouraged by a motherly art dealer, Ethel Barry-more, who buys his watercolors and urges him to find new avenues of expression.
One day he meets Jennie Appleton. (Miss Jones), a little girl dressed in old-fashioned clothing, in Central Park. He finds the encounter a strangely haunting one, and it is repeated over the months from winter through spring into summer, with the little girl maturing into an adolescent and then into a young woman on the verge of college graduation. Jennie is strange, speaks of things long past, her speech and manner redolent of another era. Yet she and Eben, the painter, establish a spiritual intimacy, and soon he is in love with her.
He persuades her on one of her unexpected visits to pose for a portrait, and when he finishes it and shows it to Miss Barrymore and her associate, Cecil Kellaway, they are surprised and deeply impressed by its haunting loveliness and spiritual profundity. Meanwhile Jennie, who on her first appearance as a little girl, had sung for him a strange song with its only words: “Where I came from, nobody knows, where I am going everyone goes,” seems restless and concerned, and portents indicate that they will soon be parted forever.
Through information she has given him at random, he traces her back through time, visiting people who had acquaintance with “Jennie Appleton”— an old vaudeville-house attendant who had kept scrapbooks of her parents, killed in a high-wire act, and a photo of Jennie, looking much as Eben had seen her. The trail leads eventually to the nun at Jennie’s college (Lillian Gish), who tells him that Jennie had died in a great hurricane up in New England in the 1920s.
Eben refuses to believe that Jennie is lost to him, and follows his instinct up to Cape Cod, where he finds himself caught in an offshore storm identical with that which had taken Jennie’s life. She appears to him during the hurricane, tells him they will never be spiritually parted, and then disappears into the spray, though he tries desperately to hold on to her.
He believes her words, and when he finds her scarf, he feels he has concrete proof that they are, indeed, forever united in spirit and that they will be together in eternity when his own time comes.
Such a theme is, of course, fragile and delicate in the extreme, and when the film was released in 1949, it was unfavorably compared by some critics with the Nathan novel, a few offering the opinion that the theme read better than it filmed.
I have always thought it a moving and beautiful film, its thesis valid in spirit if not provable by human logic. Paul Osborn and Peter Berneis made every effort to forge a screenplay that faithfully reflected the spirit of the original, and to my mind they largely succeeded.
The photography is particularly fine, and Joseph August’s color sequences, interspersed with the prevailing black-and-white, are most effective. Clarence Seifer’s special effects are commendable, and the process and miniature photography of Paul Eagler is inventive.
The famed hurricane sequence at the end, which was seen on a super-cycloramic screen in some houses especially equipped for it, was a masterpiece of photographic technology and was widely hailed for its inventiveness. The music is an added asset, with Dimitri Tiomkin weaving throughout the film some enchanting variations on Claude Debussy’s loveliest themes, most notably The Afternoon of a Faun.
The performances are first-rate, with Jennifer Jones catching the elusive nuances of a girl who is spirit rather than flesh; her portrayal of Jennie Appleton, the girl who transcended barriers of time, dissolution, place and spirit to reach out to her true love, is one of her finest, and Joseph Cotten is sensitive and highly responsive to the unusual theme and treatment, giving the delicate story a substance and reality that at times it needs. Ethel Barrymore, Kellaway, Miss Gish, Florence Bates and David Wayne all lend sterling support.
Of Portrait of Jennie it can be said, as the Catholic devout say of alleged miracles: “For those with faith, no explanation is necessary; for those without it, no explanation is possible.”
Those who feel that Death represents but a temporary parting of loving spirits will draw comfort from this film today as in 1949, and those who see in Death mere annihilation and oblivion will, at the very least, be accorded food for thought. And those who believe in Love as a universal, timeless, all-encompassing force will find Portrait of Jennie one of its more compelling and touching expressions.
GC Film Series - Spring 2001
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