The story takes place in New York, where sincere but struggling artist Eben (Joseph Cotten) can't sell his paintings nor meet his rent. Sympathetic art dealers Miss Spinney (Ethel Barrymore) and Matthews (Cecil Kellaway), feeling sorry for him, buy one of his still lifes, but she nails his problem. Looking at his portfolio, Miss Spinney admires Eben's technical ability, but can see no love in his work.

Mild Spoilers

Later in Central Park, Eben meets a young schoolgirl, Jennie (Jennifer Jones), who gradually inspires his art. Every time they meet, she seems to age several years, gradually approaching womanhood. As he paints her portrait, his first great work, he simultaneously falls in love with her. At the same time, he quickly determines that she's some sort of apparition, an eternal spirit of a woman who had died many years earlier.

Eben's quick acceptance of Jennie's ghostly existence is one of Portrait of Jennie's strengths. Usually such films waste several reels as their protagonists try to rationalize their way out of what is already quite obvious to the audience. But many good fantasies (A Matter of Life and Death is another one) skip such needless exposition and get with it. In this case it's the love between Eben and Jennie, his art, and Eben's efforts to learn more about this mysterious woman and to try and figure out a way they're relationship can last.

The fleeting quality of their love -- she drifts in and out of his life, disappearing for months at a time -- is handled quite logically. He tries to accept what he and Jennie cannot control, but once separated he spirals into a lonely, all-consuming depression just the same.

The tightly edited film (it's only 86 minutes long) is haunting and romantic, and the key to that success is its almost uniformly excellent cast, and the incredible beauty of its photography. (The score, by both Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin, based in part on music by Claude Debussy, is excellent, too.)

The film was shot by Joseph H. August (who died long before the film was released) and an uncredited Lee Garmes. The film seems to have been greatly influenced by the work of Stanley Cortez, with whom Garmes had shot Since You Went Away (1944). All the scenes with Jones and Cotten, those which straddle two worlds as it were, have the same kind of elegiac quality as Cortez's design for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and other films of the period. Some scenes open with a kind of textural layering, shots looking like they were painted on a canvas. Jones' appearances often come in the form of silhouettes with the sun shining directly into the camera behind her. Overall these scenes have a look one might call fantasy noir.

The film is somewhat experimental in many respects. There are no opening credits (just quotes from Keats and Euripides), and some gimmicky but highly effective printing tricks noted below. Also unusual is the fact that so much of the film was shot on location in New York, making extremely good use of Central Park especially. The move out of backlots and to locations far from Hollywood was underway in the late-1940s, but is exceptionally done here.

Joseph Cotten was one of Hollywood's most underrated actors. Within just a few years he had starred in Citizen Kane (1941), Ambersons, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Third Man (1949) and many other fine films. At 43 he was perhaps too old to be entirely convincing as a struggling young artist, rather like Jimmy Stewart's naive young 50-something lawyer in The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, but Cotten is so good that's easily forgiven.

Jones is also very good, projecting the kind of ethereal beauty for which she was famous. Both Ethel Barrymore and silent great Lillian Gish make the most of their supporting parts, as do Cecil Kellaway, Henry Hull, and Florence Bates.

David Wayne (in his film debut) and Albert Sharpe play Eben's Irish pals. Both were starring on Broadway in Finian's Rainbow, which helps to explain their appearance. Sharpe's bar owner commissions a mural of Michael Collins to bring in customers, and one wonders if and how these pro-IRA scenes played in Great Britain, or if Selznick had to recut the film for release there.

The final scene, an epilogue really, features Anne Francis, Nancy Davis (later Reagan), and Nancy Olson, all so young (they were 17, 26, and 19, respectively) this reviewer didn't recognize them at first.

Finally, for the record, scenes of Mickey Mouse and Minnie make a rare appearance in a non-Disney film. At one point Eben visits the Rialto movie theater where The Whoopee Party (1932) can be seen playing in the background.

Video & Audio

This reviewer hasn't seen the out-of-print Anchor Bay DVD of Portrait of Jennie (released November 28, 2000), but wouldn't be surprised if this were the same transfer. By 2004 standards the image is quite soft. There's a big "oh-oh!" when Selznick's familiar logo first appears, but the movie looks better than the washed out Culver City pseudo-mansion appears. Part of the problem in assessing the image is that so much of the film consists of optical layering and experimental lighting that at times it's hard to say what's soft and what always looked that way.

Like the Anchor Bay release, this version retains the full Technicolor insert, plus the final reel tinting effects (which are both green and sepia, not just the former). Originally, the film opened with the final sequence in Magnavision, a wide screen process that mostly enlarged the image to encompass the entire stage area. (Old downtown movie palaces, originally built to accommodate live stage shows with their movies, tended to have prosceniums better-suited to 'scope-shaped films than full-frame movies.) It would have been interesting to have the image click into 16:9 anamorphic at this point, but given the compositions it's probably better off without it.

The mono sound is standard late-forties recording caliber. MGM's bare bones DVD includes English, French, and Spanish subtitles, but no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

Portrait of Jennie is a beautifully made film, not perfect but lavish and constantly inventive and surprising in its design if not its story. It's a shame Disney (releasing the title through MGM) seems to have no interest at all in even the best of their Selznick titles. They deserve better.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.