Portrait of Jennie **** (1948, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe, Henry Hull, Florence Bates) – Classic Movie Review 4568

Director William Dieterle’s mysterious and enjoyable 1948 romance tells an engagingly peculiar story. It stars Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones as the destitute, unsuccessful Depression era artist Eben Adams (Cotten) who meets the ghostly, eerily beautiful Jennie Appleton (Jones) in New York’s Central Park, paints her and falls in love with her. But she grows older on every occasion that he meets her and he suspects that she is the spirit of a girl who died in a tempest.

It also stars Ethel Barrymore as Miss Spinney, Lillian Gish as Mother Mary of Mercy, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe, Henry Hull and Florence Bates as Mrs Jekes the landlady.

Also in the cast are Felix Bressart, Clem Bevans, Maude Simmons, Nancy Davis [Reagan], Robert Dudley, John Farrell, Anne Francis, Brain Keith, Esther Somers and Nancy Olsen.

Remarkably, the fine cast, producer David O Selznick and director Dieterle manage to turn these rum goings-on into a haunting, convincing romantic fantasy drama. It is easy to regard the quiet authority of Cotten’s acting and admire Jones’s glowing beauty, and also to be captivated by Joseph H August’s magical, Oscar nominated black and white cinematography and Dimitri Tiomkin’s haunting arrangements of Claude Debussy’s classical music score.

And it is topped off with an unforgettable climax when a tidal wave hits the New England coast. The original print had this ten minute storm sequence tinted in green and the finale shot of the portrait in Technicolor. The two scenes in between are in a sepia tint and so are the end titles. Though the movie was long shown in black and white, these are now restored. Originally the storm sequence was also screened in an early widescreen format.

The credits are at the end for there are no opening credits (apart from the studio logo) and a narrator speaks the prologue and announces: ‘And now, Portrait of Jennie’. We begin with poems: ‘Who knoweth if to die be but to live and that called life by mortals be but death?’ (Euripides) and ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ (Keats).

It is an Oscar-winner for Best Special Effects for Paul Eagler, J McMillan Johnson, Russell Shearman and Clarence Slifer (visual) and Charles L Freeman and James G Stewart (audible). Cotten won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival (1949).

The screenplay by Peter Berneis, Paul Osborn and Leonardo Bercovici (adaptation) is based on a novel by Robert Nathan.

David Wayne, Nancy Reagan and Nancy Olsen make their feature film debuts.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4568

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