by John Grant
vt Tidal Wave
US / 87 minutes / bw with some tinting (green/sepia) and brief color / Vanguard, Selznick Dir: William Dieterle Pr: David O. Selznick Scr: Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis, Leonardo Bercovici Story: Portrait of Jennie (1940) by Robert Nathan Cine: Joseph August Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe, Henry Hull, Florence Bates, Felix Bressart, Clem Bevans, Maude Simmons, Anne Francis, Nancy Olson, Nancy Davis.
The novel by Robert Nathan upon which this movie is based is often cited as a classic of fantasy fiction, even though today it seems really quite dated in many respects, notably its overt religiosity. (It’s also unfashionably short; you sometimes come across it described as a novella.) Aside from that religiosity, however, Nathan kept his tale pretty spare; he (obviously deliberately) made no attempt to rationalize or organize the supernatural heart of the story, leaving it as an account of some events the narrator has experienced that he neither can explain nor, really, wishes to explain. This verisimilitude is part of what makes the novel so affecting. (I made some notes on it here.)
For the movie it was obviously decided that the story needed to be fleshed out by the addition of fresh incidents and a bevy of character roles—while at the same time, for some reason, excising some of the incidents from the novel as well as one of its significant characters, the narrator’s scapegrace artist buddy Arne. Much (but far from all) of the religiosity was pared away too, to be replaced by scads of portentous narration, some remarkably pretentious dialogue, and an effort to make sense of the tale’s finale, an effort that shouldn’t have been made. There’s also some technical gimmickry that just seems baffling to us now (although the visual effects brought the movie its solitary Oscar): the onset of the climactic storm is for no apparent reason marked by a switch (from bw) to green tinting, while the aftermath of the storm is tinted sepia. The final moments, showing the finished portrait supposedly hanging in NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are done in Technicolor; by contrast with the tinting, this flourish is effective. Most effective of all, throughout the movie, is the occasional imposition on the screen of a canvas-like texturing, as if this were how the artist narrator was experiencing the city—as a series of potential paintings.
All in all, then, this seems like that rara avis, a movie that might have benefited from having had less money spent on it. I can’t exactly say that a hypothetical Monogram or PRC version of Portrait of Jennie would have been a better movie, but it would assuredly have trimmed away some of the excesses that reduced this version from potentially a classic to something that we watch—and that affects us and haunts our memory—almost despite itself, as if Nathan’s story was managing to make itself heard through the clutter of Selznick’s production. Portrait of Jennie has the very special quality of being a movie that’s better in the mind’s eye than it is in the flesh. Perhaps that makes it a classic after all.
The pseudo-intellectual portentousness is there from the outset, in a narrated opener that lasts a full two minutes and comes complete with quotations from Euripides and Keats (unusually for the time, there are no opening credits except the standard Selznick Studio montage):
Since the beginning, man has looked into the awesome reaches of infinity and asked the eternal question: “What is time? And what is space? What is life? What is . . . death?”
The Euripides quote (“Who knoweth if to die be but to live . . . and that called life by mortals be but death?”) is then splashed onscreen to make sure we realize this is a cultural event we’re witnessing, not just a movie.
Through a hundred civilizations, philosophers and scientists have come with answers, but the bewilderment remains. For each human soul must find the secret in its own faith. The tender and haunting legend of the portrait of Jennie is based on the two ingredients of faith: truth and hope.
There’s more, much more of this woffle—including the outrageous claim that both Jennie and the portrait genuinely existed, the latter having been shown at the Met—until we get to:
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.
By this point, many of us might have been tempted to make a bolt for the exits, but that would be a mistake because the movie does have a decided power to haunt, as mentioned above.
We first meet Eben Adams (Cotten) as a starving artist in New York City who would long ago have had to return to his native Maine were it not for his friendship with cabby Gus O’Toole (Wayne) and the strictly conditional mercy of his landlady, Mrs. Jekes (Bates). One wintery evening Eben tries his luck for the first time at the art dealership Matthews & Spinney. Mr. Matthews (Kellaway) and Miss Spinney (Barrymore) see nothing in his portfolio that’s of any value but Spinney sees promise in the artist, and gives him the ridiculous sum of $12.50 for a floral painting. She also tells him that he’ll never make the grade as an artist unless he learns to love his subject matter.
This theme of love as an essential component of life runs throughout the movie. Spinney is depicted as a spinster who knows about love but has never until now known love itself; the love she develops for Eben, which is certainly not maternal, is in its way as deeply romantic, albeit platonic, as the love story that’s the movie’s focus. In this sense, Eben is the saving of her. And at the movie’s end, as the lovers are being battered by the stormy seas, Jennie spells out the message, the moral of the tale: “There is no life, my darling, until you’ve loved and been loved. And then there is no death.”
After his successful visit to Matthews & Spinney, Eben ambles through Central Park, and it’s there that for the first time he encounters Jennie Appleton (Jones). She’s depicted as just a little girl at this stage, with Jones affecting a child’s mannerisms while perspective and props are used to give the impression that she’s far smaller than the actress actually was. For most of the time the trickery works quite well; sometimes, though, we have the disorienting sensation that the child has suddenly got a bit bigger or smaller.
It becomes immediately evident that Jennie has slipped out of her own time. She talks of her parents as being trapeze artists playing at the Hammerstein’s Victoria, which Eben knows was “torn down years ago when I was a boy.” She leaves behind her a colored scarf wrapped in a newspaper that Eben will notice the next day dates from 1910. (He never does quite succeed, despite several attempts, in returning the scarf to her.) She sings him a little song—”Where I come from, nobody knows. And where I am going everything goes”—instructs him to wait for her to grow up (an instruction reinforced by her turning three times widdershins while wishing it be so), and then vanishes.
In the days following, Eben realizes how profoundly he’s been affected by the encounter. Matthews and Spinney realize it too: the sketch that Eben does from memory of the little girl particularly captures Matthews’s fancy, and he buys it at once. It’s clear that Eben has finally discovered what was missing from his earlier paintings.
And then along comes a subplot that adds little to proceedings. In the book, Gus cleverly talks a diner-owner friend into feeding Eben for weeks in exchange for a mural to brighten up his diner. Here this is pulled very much to the foreground, Gus and especially the diner-owner, Moore (Sharpe), are made into comic Irishmen, and the mural becomes a portrayal of Michael Collins preparing to lead a detachment of the heroic Irish Republican Army against the hated English. I imagine this subplot will not have enhanced the success of the movie’s UK release. Later on, Gus is even given a song to sing by way of an unnecessary musical interlude.
Of course, Eben has several other encounters with Jennie, in each of which she’s markedly older than the time before. They go skating in Central Park together; as she leaves him, Miss Spinney just happens to be passing by (there are one or two other annoyingly implausible coincidences) and it’s clear that, while Eben can see the departing adolescent, Spinney can’t. Later, when Jennie fails to turn up for a promised rendezvous, he goes in search of the old Hammerstein’s Victoria and what might have happened to Jennie’s parents, Mary and Frank; this permits the introduction of character actors like Bressart as elderly stage doorman Pete and Simmons as the retired wardrobe mistress Clara Morgan. From the latter he discovers that the acrobats died in an accident and Jennie was adopted by an aunt, who put her in a convent.
Eben meets Jennie again the night her parents die; she’s reassured by the thought that they’re still alive in eternity. In another encounter they watch a ceremony at the convent where she now lives, and she tells him her favorite among the nuns is Mother Mary of Mercy (Gish). When she graduates from the convent she meets him to tell him she must go away for a few months with her aunt, but that they’ll be back together afterwards and won’t have to separate again. Partly from having her sit for him in his attic studio, and partly from memory, he has been painting her portrait.
Encouraged by Gus, Eben goes to the convent to ask Mother Mary of Mercy for more about Jennie. She tells him the girl died tragically in a storm that struck while she was out boating by the Land’s End Lighthouse on Cape Cod—years ago, on October 5. From time to time, on seeing his paintings of that very lighthouse, Jennie has expressed to Eben her nameless dread for it and the waters around it. He now decides that if he can be there on this October 5—just a few days away—he might be able to save her . . .
Of course, this doesn’t make any sense at all, as Mother Mary of Mercy points out to him. This is perhaps the biggest single instance of where the movie would have been better to have retained the original novel’s non-specificity. While the climactic storm sequence is impressively rendered, and there’s nothing wrong at all with the staging of the lovers’ final, doomed encounter, all the way through these proceedings we can hardly forget that the relevant underpinning—the supposed rationale that Eben knew she’d be here and came in search of her—is absurd. (It may seem odd to criticize a fantasy for logical implausibility, but fantasy has rules like any other genre. If you introduce a real-world rationale, that rationale has to be a bit more substantive than a waving of hands and a blustering.)
Dimitri Tiomkin’s score adapts various bits of Debussy. Bernard Herrmann—of Hitchcock fame—worked on the movie earlier, but departed for “creative reasons”; the rather dreary tune for Jennie’s little song is his. The title song was by the jazz composer J. Russel Robinson.
Portrait of Jennie flopped on release; the reviews were decidedly mixed. It was reissued as Tidal Wave and flopped again. Yet over the years it managed to carve out for itself its own small niche in cinema history. When we think about the movie we tend to recall the powerful visual imagery, the movingly impossible romance, and the compelling notion of the child/young woman permitted only intermittent encounters with the love of her life, who is otherwise screened off from her by the shroud of time. There are plenty of people (my wife, I discovered, was one!) for whom the movie has become such a part of our culture that they believe Eben Adams was a real artist and that his portrait of Jennie—in fact, painted for the movie by artist Robert Brackman—really does hang at the Met. It’s not every movie that prints itself as firmly on the public consciousness as that.
A great debut on WitD John! I have not seen this film and you certainly have me intrigued. I have a soft spot for Cottten, who has a signature veracity which I find really satisfying. I surmise this role has echoes of Citizen Kane where he had to deal with a chimera of a different kind.
Many thanks for the kind words, Tony!
Hm. I’ve just noticed that I’ve managed to omit the release date (1948) from the header.
I surmise this role has echoes of Citizen Kane where he had to deal with a chimera of a different kind.
I too have a soft spot for Cotten, although I gather that in real life he had some objectionable characteristics. The role he plays here always reminds me less of the one in Citizen Kane than of that in The Third Man.
Try that again, making sure I have the italics right . . .
Many thanks for the kind words, Tony!
Hm. I’ve just noticed that I’ve managed to omit the release date (1948) from the header.
I surmise this role has echoes of Citizen Kane where he had to deal with a chimera of a different kind.
I too have a soft spot for Cotten, although I gather that in real life he had some objectionable characteristics. The role he plays here always reminds me less of the one in Citizen Kane than of that in The Third Man.
John –
Excellent review and I appreciate that it is not an all-out valentine to a film which I have never entirely warmed up to. That pretentiousness you mention is a real stumbling block for me.
I re-watched it recently, for consideration in the balotting. It didn’t end up making my list, but I can appreciate its romanticism and the emotions it evokes.
And I’m always happy to see Lillian Gish, anywhere, anytime – wish there were more of her in this film.
Yes, Gish is great here. With Gish, Kellaway, Barrymore and Cotten (far from necessarily in that order), the movie has a heckuva lineup.
Author John Grant’s Wonders in the Dark debut has yielded (as all might expect) a spectacular presentation in every possible sense, and as Part mentions above he does not oversell this exquisite if problematic film. I have always fallen under the spell of Dimitri Tiomkin’s rapturous Debussey-laden score, and the lyrical black and white cinematography of Joseph August, the latter of which is so evident in this definitive screen-cap showcase. The film has been accurately described as ‘mystic romanticism’ and it is just what one would expect from the watching eyes of Producer David O. Selznick. The hurricane sequence and the skating scene are quite memorable, and it is hard not to succumb to the work of Joseph Cotten and Jennif fer Jones, with able support from Felix Bressart, Maude Simmons, Ethel Barrymore, the incomparable Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, et al. Yes, John you are dead on as far I’m concerned when you point to the rapturous visual imagery as the deal-breaker here, even with the ludicrous narrative motifs. And it has indeed achieved a lasting cult reputations.
Again this is just a superlative piece, out of his world.
Thanks for the kind words to a very nervous contributor, Sam!
Yes, the hurricane sequence is spectacular (the skating scene doesn’t do as much for me, I fear), although I personally would have preferred it, I think, in black-and-white rather than with the green. (My judgement may be affected by the fact that the first time I ever saw this movie, if not the first twice or more, was on a bw tv set!)
As I say, for me where the movie really lives and flourishes is in the memory of it. I’ll soon forget — again! — the pretentious that Pat mentions as finding such an obstacle, the ill placed portentousness of the interminable setup, the narrative flaws, etc., and remember just the sense of welcome haunting that the central conceit conveys.
Oh, I meant to say:
The film has been accurately described as ‘mystic romanticism’
The technical term I’d prefer to use for it is “timeslip romance”, although it’s slightly unusual in that — as in Audrey Niffenegger’s much later (2003) novel The Time Traveler’s Wife — we’re seeing things not from the perspective of the timeslipping lover but from that of the one who’s being visited.
I like the film, but I can see why others are hedging their best. Joseph Cotten is one of the greats. And the film is easy on the eyes. Tremendous review by John Grant!
Thanks for the kind words, Frank!
Great review! I always got this mixed up with “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. The similarities hold only to a point, so I should always be able to sort them out, but it shows that neither one really left a lasting impression. I still do see the merits documented in this grand piece.
Thanks for the kind words, Peter. I’ve never found myself mixing this one up with The Picture of Dorian Gray, I confess. I did find, though, when I rewatched PoJ recently for the purposes of these notes, that, while in some other parts I was practically joining in with the dialogue, I’d completely forgotten the subplot about the Irish pub/diner. Perhaps wisely.
John this is as comprehensive a review of this film as I’ve seen. I really like Jennifer Jones as an actress. She has a certain quality that I can’t quite describe as much as I’d like. There’s a certain fragility and self conciousness that is fascinating to me. I find the film a bit of a mixed experience. I like great stretches of it and sometimes it strays a little beyond my comfort zone, but it’s still quite fascinating and an essential romance.
Thanks for the friendly words, Jon!
I admit I’m less engaged by Jennifer Jones than you are. One odd thing is that I persistently misremember her role in this movie — not the role, really, but the fact that she’s the one playing it. I always have to remind myself that it wasn’t Teresa Wright.
Of course, Wright had her own moments of glory alongside Cotten, especially in one of my favourite films noirs, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
Reblogged this on Noirish.
A very fine consideration of this delicate fantasy, a film I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for.
Thanks for the kind words! I too have a bit of a soft spot for it: the perfect description for my feelings about it.
This films definitely problematic in a lot of different areas, but I can’t help loving it just the same.
I have always had a special feeling for this movie, which I originally saw on network TV back in the 70’s, and have seen many times since. It has a nice feel for wintry New York and for Cape Cod, and stars three of my favorites, Jones, Cotten, and Barrymore. I love Selznick’s films, the good ones and the not so good ones. They’re all worth a look.
About the girls looking at the portrait, in the last scene…
Yes, that’s definite Anne Francis on the right. She looks so much like herself when she became a star – just younger. She was born in 1930 and would have been a teen when the film was made.
Nancy Davis can’t be the girl in the scene. She was born in 1921 and would have been in her late 20’s at the time. You can see her in MGM’s East Side, West Side, the following year, looking pretty matronly, and not at all like she had been a teenager only one year before.
And I’m not convinced the middle girl is Nancy Olson.
These girls have been identified this way for a long time but I think the info is just inaccurate, except for Anne Francis.
Thanks for writing about this movie! I enjoyed your thoughts.
Thanks for the kind words, Dave.
Looking more closely, I think you’re certainly correct about Nancy Davis/Reagan, and will ask Sam to remove the “(later Reagan)” from the caption. (While you’re at it, Sam, could you please reinstate the movie’s release date in the heading?) I wonder if this could be Nancy Lee Davis, who had a number of other uncredited parts in the 1940s and 1950s and could well have been around the right age? If I find time I’ll try to get hold of one of Nancy Lee’s other movies and see if I can spot her.
To me the middle girl looks quite a lot like Nancy Olson; who can tell? She seems never to have published an autobiography, alas.
I grew up watching “Portrait of Jennie” each time it appeared on television. The actress, Maude Simmons was my grandmother’s first cousin, and although she had passed away several years before my birth, I felt that I somehow knew her! O developed a fondness for the movie, enjoying its supernatural flavor in the mystery of Jennie Appleton, and in my teen years, the thrill of the romance between the two lead characters. Because of all that, I don’t have a negative thing to say about the entire movie. Thank goodness for YouTube, I can watch it again whenever I want.
What a great reminiscence, Lisa — many thanks!
I first saw “Portrait of Jennie” in early 1958 (I was 12) when it premiered locally in the Metropolitan area on Million Dollar Movie. I was immediately engrossed in it (and I still am) and watched it that week as many times as I could. MDM showed the same film all week long ( and weekends) in those day. It’s still my favorite movie of 1948.
I know what you mean about its addictiveness, Glen; despite all my qualms about the production, I’ve watched the movie a bundle of times over the years.