NOT LONG AGO, for no special reason, I rewatched one of my favorite Hollywood guilty pleasures: Duel in the Sun from 1946. This Technicolor Western can elicit guffaws of derision, and certainly the casting of Jennifer Jones, given a makeup tan, as the half-Indian hellion Pearl Chavez, and Gregory Peck as Lewt (rhymes with “lewd”) McCanles, dissolute son of a prominent rancher, does not bode well.
But every time I see Duel in the Sun, I succumb to the sheer audacity of Lewt and Pearl’s fierce passion. Jones steamrolls right over the plot holes, dark hair buoyed by the desert winds, her eyes flashing with almost alarming intensity. At the end, Pearl and Lewt track each other through a desolate landscape, exchanging gunfire until they realize that love/lust conquers all. Wounded, Pearl crawls through the dust and over jagged rocks, seeking out her beloved for one last embrace. The moment is downright Wagnerian in its excessiveness.
When I heard the news that Jones had passed away last Dec. 17 at age 90, my Duel in the Sun screening seemed like a premonition of the kind that animates her finest film, Portrait of Jennie (1948). In Portrait, based on a novel by the once renowned and now forgotten Robert Nathan, Jones plays a strange girl from the early 1900s who encounters a starving artist, Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten), in New York during the Depression. Trapped in some kind of time warp, Jennie shows up at key moments in Eben’s life, each time a few years older. She speaks mystically about “catching up” with Eben so that they can be together forever. But when Eben tries to hold onto this bewitching creature, she flits away, until fate decrees that her own forestalled death catch up with her.
This soft-focus fantasy, delicately directed by William Dieterle, emphasizes the otherworldly side of Jones, more suited to her essential nature than the sensuous parts she took in Duel in the Sun and later Ruby Gentry.
She is at once achingly desirable and yet tantalizingly unobtainable—a perfect muse to an older male artist. Eben makes his name painting her portrait, and in a weird real-life intervention, the wealthy art collector Norton Simon once owned the eponymous portrait (by Robert Brackman) of Jennie/Jennifer used in the film, and ended up marrying her.
Another man, the one who most determined our image of one of Hollywood’s great female stars, was producer David O. Selznick, who discovered Oklahoma-born Phylis Lee Isley, changed her name, made her a star and micromanaged her career until his death in 1965. He, too, owned that famous portrait, conveying a double sense of possession, of the woman and the image.
“Today I have chatted about the matter [the movie Claudia] with Phylis Walker—for whom, incidentally, I have a great enthusiasm, in case you don’t already know this. …” That memo to story editor Katharine Brown by Selznick, a prodigious memo writer, sounds innocent enough, but soon his obsession would bring down two marriages.
Phylis Isley, born March 2, 1919, showed up in Hollywood as Phylis Walker, married to actor Robert Walker (most famous as Bruno Anthony in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) and with two small children. Although she hated her first screen test, Selznick was smitten by the “big-eyed girl” with an “eager, blushing quality” and gave her a contract. He called her married name “particularly undistinguished” and settled on Jennifer with a “one-syllable last name that has some rhythm to it and that is easy to remember.”
Jones started strong, in 1943’s The Song of Bernadette about the teenager struck by a vision of the Virgin Mary. She landed the Oscar for the role, thanks to her freshness; like Ingrid Bergman she exuded a new kind of naturalism onscreen.
Jones, at 25, was cast again as a teenager in the Selznick-produced World War II home-front family drama Since You Went Away, another indication of a tendency to innocence and even infantilism in her persona. Duel in the Sun veered wildly in the other direction.
Jones and Selznick’s professional relationship turned very personal during the making of Since You Went Away, which featured Mr. and Mrs. Walker as lovers. Their romantic scenes, relentlessly overseen by Selznick, were painful for Robert Walker. After their divorce, he turned to drink and sought psychiatric care. He died in 1951 after a troubling incident in which he had a kind of emotional fit and then suffered an adverse reaction to sodium amytal given to him by a psychiatrist.
Although she was one of the biggest stars of the late 1940s, Jones’ life after marriage to Selznick, in 1949, wasn’t easy. She herself survived cancer and once tried suicide, and her daughter by Selznick, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide, in 1976.
Perhaps due to Selznick’s control-freak tendencies, she didn’t make as many movies as she might have in the 1950s, although she is wonderfully amusing in the ensemble cast of Beat the Devil and quite touching as a married American woman almost falling for a sensitive Italian man (Montgomery Clift) in Vittorio De Sica’s Indiscretion of an American Wife.
Following Selznick’s death in 1965, she was lost for a while. Has anyone seen Angel Angel Down We Go, a.k.a. Cult of the Damned? She plays the mother of a daughter (Holly Near) who makes bad choices in men, music and mood-altering drugs. Her last role was in the cameo range, along with a high-rise full of stars, in Towering Inferno. She turned then to art collecting and mental-health advocacy.
Like two other troubled dark-haired beauties of midcentury Hollywood—Vivien Leigh and Gene Tierney—Jones evinces a sometimes-painful fragility. It’s easy to imagine some role switching among this trio. Jones would have made a fine Blanche DuBois, and David Thomson reports that, surprisingly, Selznick didn’t want Jones to consider Tierney’s role in Laura, another tale of a woman whose beauty is so stunning that she can best be admired through the mediation of a painted portrait.
In her best roles, Jones is like some kind of wayward angel, suspended between heaven and earth. She is forever with us and forever retreating before our desires.
Jones Onscreen
HE Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto has just launched a Jennifer Jones retrospective that runs through the end of the month. As always, these films benefit immensely from being seen in crisp prints on the big screen. Duel in the Sun stampedes over its more risible moments the bigger its Technicolor luridness is writ, and Portrait of Jennie’s atmospheric nostalgia envelops viewers in a darkened theater in a way that home video can’t replicate.
The Stanford Theatre is located at 221 University Ave., Palo Alto. (650.324.3700)
Love Letters (1945)
In a kind of warm-up for Portrait of Jennie, Love Letters pairs Joseph Cotten and Jones in an unorthodox romance. During World War II, Alan (Cotten), in a Cyrano plot device, writes love letters on behalf of his pal to a girl named Victoria (Jones). Sensitive and a little morose as only Cotten can be, he fantasizes about Victoria and wants to meet her after returning to England. Turns out that Victoria, now called Singleton, is an amnesiac who can’t remember how her husband died—although she’s been charged with his murder. Alan falls for the strange girl, who seems detached from her own life. In turn, she senses a bond with Alan, because it was his words that first touched her heart.
The tone is just a bit off, as the stolid Alan tries to understand the sometimes maddeningly elusive Singleton; director William Dieterle would try again and succeed with a similar dynamic in Jennie. In both films, Jones’ character inspires raptures of art, both written and visual, fulfilling her highest cinematic role as a muse. It is gorgeously photographed by Lee Garmes, and Jones’ Singleton is singularly beautiful, even making a beret look good, worn slanting across her mounds of curls. In a weird footnote, the story is based on a novel by Christopher Massie with a script by Objectivist icon Ayn Rand. (MSG)
Gone to Earth (1950)
Gone to Earth is a rarity by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger about a spirited young Gypsy (Jones) with a love for all God’s creatures who is pursued by a squire who wants her as badly as he wants the fox over the next hedgerow. It sounds like a cross between D.H. Lawrence and W.H. Hudson (and Jones would have made a very good Rima in Green Mansions). In Technicolor. It was picked up by Selznick, recut and released two years later in the United States as The Wild Heart. Both Gone to Earth and Love Letters are nearly impossible to find on home video, so this is a must-see double bill. (MSG) Jan. 13–15: Letters at 7:30pm; Gone at 5:35 and 9:25pm.
Duel in the Sun (1946)
Gregory Peck goes richly bad in this creamy bonbon. He plays a black-clad villain, the evil brother of Joseph Cotten, who gets his girl stolen once again. Selznick’s follow-up to Gone With the Wind, based on a novel by San Francisco’s Niven Busch, is a kitsch classic. Jones plays the hot-blooded half-breed Pearl Chavez; her good half is prayed over by Walter Huston, a preacher calling himself “The Sinkiller.” Pearl’s bad half is drawn to a leering Peck, who won’t forbear to spy on a lady when she’s bathing. The overstuffed cast includes Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Charles Bickford, Butterfly McQueen and even Lillian Gish. (RvB)
Portrait of Jennie (1948)
A failure of nerve is evident everywhere in this otherwise almost perfect romantic movie Portrait of Jennie. It is overnarrated, explaining a subject matter that would be better left enigmatic. On the bright side, Portrait of Jennie is gloriously overnarrated. During an gleaming vista of Manhattan crowned with rays of frosty light comes an intro of what even Selznick termed “pseudoscientific hokeypokey.”
Ben Hecht’s prologue drops the names of Euripides, Keats and Browning before expanding: “Science tells us that nothing ever dies but only changes, that time itself does not pass, but curves around us, and that the past and the future are together at our side forever. Out of the shadows of knowledge, and out of a painting that hung on a museum wall, comes our story, the truth of which lies not on our screen, but in your heart.” Hokeypokey perhaps; pseudoscientific, perhaps not. “This was tomorrow, once,” Jennie says. The idea of a romance about relativity is more logical in 2005 than it was in 1948. Imagine Portrait of Jennie as an infinitely superior version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
As for the hokeypokey about the truth and the heart: only the truly heartless would fail to respond to Joseph Cotten’s noble culpability. He plays Eben Adams, a painter as unsuccessful at the brush as his Holly Martins from The Third Man was at the typewriter. Wandering into Central Park during the frozen horror of the Depression, he meets a young girl unstuck in time—Jennie Appleton (Jones, who is as good at the spiritual purity of desire here as she is at earthy lust in Duel in the Sun). Jennie serves as both his love and his muse; she ages at a much faster rate than he does. And while she gives him courage, she also leaks clues about her own past and future. Tracking down Jennie, Adams visits a convent where she stayed; Lillian Gish plays the nun who vets Jennie’s goodness. Still, the fate of the girl is foretold in advance, despite Adams’ desperate effort to save her.
Portrait of Jennie touches a nerve in a way that won’t let logic block the sting. The care that went into the movie wins over all, in the snowscapes of Manhattan, in the surprise use of tinting and Technicolor and in a climactic tempest scene that successfully brings back the mood of D.W. Griffith, exactly as Selznick intended. As in the emotionally similar Vertigo, Portrait of Jennie appeals to the part of the mind that never can accept death as something that is fair or natural. (RvB)
Jan. 16-17: Duel at 3:30 and 7:30pm; Portrait at 5:50 and 9:50pm. Jan 18: Duel at 7:30pm; Portrait at 5:50 and 9:50pm.
Cluny Brown (1946)
British plumbing is no joke, but Ernst Lubitsch’s swan song is a comedy on precisely this dolorous topic. The film is a metaphor for changing times—a joke on those to whom class mobility was as distressing as a backed-up drain. The heroine (Jones) is a warmhearted orphan whose secret superpower is the ability to fix unenthusiastic English drains. Through trifling circumstances, Cluny is forced into an engagement with a damp and disapproving pharmacist.
Richard Haydn plays the one drip Cluny can’t fix. Hadyn’s reading of the line “I could relish a crumpet” is dialect comedy at its richest. Fortunately, Cluny is rescued by an emigrant professor (Charles Boyer) who is working on a text about “Morality vs. Expediency”—Lubitsch’s lifelong theme. Stiff in points, and Jones has a clumsy drunk scene, but the film is frequently sublime. Jones displays considerable flair and charm in a rare comedic role. (RvB)
Beat the Devil (1953)
Beat the Devil suggests a remake of director John Huston’s own The Maltese Falcon written by Joe Orton, and it characterizes the white man’s burden as a bag of loot. The lounging adventurer Billy Dannreuther (Humphrey Bogart), stuck in a podunk Italian beach town, has a tip on some uranium fields in Africa; he’s waiting with several fellow adventurers for transport there. His partners include Robert Morley, subbing for Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre as a German-accented “Mr. O’Hara.”
During the forced wait, Dannreuther’s wife, Maria (Gina Lollobrigida), takes a liking to an upper-class Englishman, Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown). Fortunately for Dannreuther, Chelm has a neglected wife, Gwendolen, played by Jones, looking better in cat’s-eye sunglasses than anyone has ever looked since and again demonstrating her neglected talent for light comedy. The adventure of a few shady men trying to rip off Kenya holds up a cracked mirror to imperial pretensions, specifically British imperial pretensions. If Beat the Devil doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, forgive it: as Gwendolen sighs, “Charm and dependability so seldom go in the same package.” (RvB)
Jan. 19–20: Cluny at 7:30pm; Beat at 5:50 and 9:20pm.
Carrie (1952)
Carrie is William Wyler’s adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel about a small-town girl’s attempts to survive in Chicago in the 1890s and the compromises she must make. After enduring the pawings of a traveling salesman (Eddie Albert), Carrie has an affair with a married man (Laurence Olivier). It does not, as is so often the case with Dreiser, end well for either party, although the movie softens the book’s conclusion. (MSG)
We Were Strangers (1949)
In a bit of strange casting that must have fed off her role in Duel in the Sun, Jones plays China Valdés, a Cuban woman inspired to pre-Castro (circa 1933) rebellion when her brother is killed by the Machado government. A romance blossoms between China and an outside agitator named Tony (John Garfield). The forces of repression are well represented by the great Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz. The real meat of the film comes in a long climactic sequence in which the rebels dig a tunnel in order to plant a bomb. Director John Huston’s sympathies clearly lie with the revolutionaries in a way that seems surprisingly frank for 1949 Hollywood. Distinguished by some terrific location shooting in Havana. (MSG)
Jan. 21–22: Carrie at 7:30pm and Strangers at 5:30 and 9:40pm; Jan. 23: Carrie at 3:20 and 7:30pm, Strangers at 5:30 and 9:40pm.
Since You Went Away (1944)
Intending “a war story without battles,” David O. Selznick pounced on a magazine serial. Selznick adapted it under a pseudonym and cast Jones, Claudette Colbert and an out-of-retirement Shirley Temple as the women in a tale of the World War II home front. Jones was acting against her soon-to-be-ex-husband Robert Walker, which adds extra pathos to her scenes. Certainly, this is more of an artifact than a great movie, a taste of overproduced dramas to come. Shot in what James Agee called “Hollywood’s pearliest mezzotones” by Stanley Cortez, it’s practically a by-product of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, what with Cortez, Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, plus Magnificent Ambersons set designer Mark-Lee Kirk (whose hand is most visible in the famous airplane hangar dance sequence). (RvB)
Jan. 24: 2 and 7:30pm; Jan. 25–26: 7:30pm
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)
Jones’ Betsy Rath is, if not a mad housewife, a severely disgruntled one. The movie is best remembered as being the uncredited sire of TV’s Mad Men. Significantly, that later Jones, January, is named Betty but sometimes called “Betsy” by her straying husband, Don Draper. Jones’ Betsy isn’t in a lot of the film; she’s the goad and moral compass to husband Tom (Gregory Peck), who is pressured into taking a Madison Avenue job that slightly morally compromises him.
Today’s legions of unemployed would-be sell-outs in the communications field will be baffled trying to figure out Rath’s problem with a job ghostwriting. Tom Rath has a secret of his own, regarding a wartime romance with a distressed Italian woman (Marisa Pavan). Obviously, Sloan Wilson’s bestselling novel spoke to the dissatisfaction of thousands of Tom (W)Raths who had been traumatized in World War II; once soldiers, they were now forced into the rituals of commuter train riding and desk jobs.
That credibility doesn’t give this overlong, static movie much more punch. Bernard Herrmann tries to galvanize the stagy action with shocking music. The poorly used CinemaScope makes every scene look staged inside a warehouse, and director Nunnally Johnson can’t heat up the leads. But clothed in burnt-orange and russet, Jones is a one-woman display of the charms of autumn leaves. It takes all of her force not to make Betsy Rath look like a harpy, and she succeeds. (RvB)
Jan. 27–28: 7:30pm
