Portrait of Jennie

In 1930s Manhattan, Eben, a painter who cannot sell anything, meets a girl in Central Park. She is dressed in an old fashion and talks about a theatre that closed long ago. At each meeting she has grown older. He begins her portrait, and the more he learns about her the less the dates fit. The film is not interested in a ghost story. It is interested in an artist finding his subject: only while drawing Jennie does Eben become a painter, and the film sets love as the condition of talent. The price of that is clear from the start. The form is painterly: canvas texture was laid over the image, and the foggy park and New York in winter are pushed towards painting. Models and a huge water tank were used for the storm at the end, and in its original run that sequence played with a widened screen ratio, sound spread across more speakers, and a brief shift into colour. William Dieterle directed for producer David O. Selznick, who built the film around Jennifer Jones. The budget passed four million dollars, more than Gone with the Wind cost. It did not recover at the box office but won the Academy Award for special effects. Joseph Cotten plays Eben and Ethel Barrymore the gallery owner. Who it is for: viewers who like forties fantastical melodrama and visual experiment. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a rational explanation. The film never resolves its question of time and the final section slides into spectacle.