PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 555, 10 February 1950, Page 14

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

(Selznick-B.E.F.) TENNIE. was the daughter of trapeze artists who performed death-defying feats on the high wire. One day tragedy struck; a wire broke and her parents’ were killed. An aunt sent Jennie to a convent, and after that she had a trip to Europe, went to College, and eventually graduated. But Jennie was a strange lonely creature who felt nobody loved hér, and one day she went sailing off. Cape Cod, and was drowned in a: hurricane, There was a deserted lighthouse neat by, and if she could have reached it she would have been saved. Many years later Jennie’s portrait was painted by a poor painter who lived in New York. The portrait was a masterpiece and made him famous, for he loved her deeply, and she loved him. Yet he had never known her when she was alive. Portrait of Jennie is the story of a love affair between a man and a ghost, adapted from Robert Nathan’s novel, a tale of purest fantasy that has been partially (and not very successfully) overlaid with a varnish, of metaphysical suggestion, and dressed up in some rather too artistic camera work. Yet because of the novelty and simplicity of the original idea, and a sort of dumbly mulish performance by Joseph Cotten in the principal role, it is, on the whole, one of Hollywood’s more satisfying ventures into the-supernatural. Cotten is an artist starving in a garret, painting perfect but lifeless landscapes that no one will buy. One day, after a visit to an art dealer during which he realises he is a failure, he meets a little girl (Jennifer Jones) in the.snow-covered park. Because they are both lonely, they are attracted to each other and after she has gone he does a brilliant sketch of her. They meet again several times. At first he believes she is a real person, but by skilful gradations, as he talks to various people who knew her-an old stage hand, an ancient negro servant, a teacher at the convent where she stayed--he becomes convinced of what he had suspected, that she is a spirit, returned to earth especially to visit him, Yet she is undoubtedly flesh and blood, and at each successive ap‘pearance has aged several years, so that she becomes in a few weeks a beautiful young woman. But their love cannot be consummated, ‘and fate inexorably drags her from his arms in a recapitulation of the original hurricane in vince she was drowned. The significance of the ‘bey, is fhat the inspiration she gave his painting remains with him, and she leaves a silk scarf behind to stop him from ever doubting the reality of her appearance. The film therefore deliberately accepts the supernatural: Jennie is certainly dead but the scarf, we are persuaded, shows that she just as certainly returned to earth in corporeal form. Its weakness is that it tries to make this point too definitely and ‘too pretentiously. Where restraint and .under-statement would have been most convincing, we are treated to a quotation from Euripides and an unseén narrator’s ‘dissertation on the theme of time, life; and space. This might have been all right, but ' there is an artificial slickness about the

production on the technical side which belies any apparently serious intent. The hurricane at the end is the least convincing part. The awe-inspiring shots of whirling, massed cloud formations and enormous waves, and the greenish tinge in which this part is photographed, did not produce in me the desired suggestion of supernatural geings-on. The atmosphere that Director William Dieterle creates in the early part is much better, where the loneliness of the painter’s existence is brought out by numerous small touches. The few minor roles are all well played — Cecil Kellaway and Ethel Barrymore as the art dealers, and David Wayne and Felix Brassart as Cotten’s poor friends.