Portrait of Jennie poster & wallpaper

Albert Sharpe, Cecil Kellaway, Clem Bevans

Artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) has never been able to impress infuential art dealer Henry Matthews with his work ... until he meets a schoolgirl in Central Park named Jennie (Jennifer Jones). There...( read more  read more... ) is a mystical quality about Jennie, and she intrigues him with the way she chats on about things that happened years ago. When Eben sketches Jennie, it shows more expression and emotion than anything else he has ever done.

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80% liked it

1,267 ratings

Critics

91% liked it

11 critics

Unrated, 86 min.

Directed by: William Dieterle

Release Date: December 25, 1948

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DVD Release Date: November 28, 2000

Stats: 113 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (113)

  • brooklynspo
    January 31, 2008
    brooklynspo
    Killer. So damn romantic. Like a black and white Vertigo meets Stairway To Heaven in depression era New York but without any crimes or trials. The theme even sounds like Vertigo's. Go Selznick!
  • keith222
    November 18, 2008
    keith222
    A mysterious romantic tale of two people deeply in love. I have never seem a romantic film with so many Noir aspects. The last 10 minutes of the film had me surprised. I was not expecting a visual twist like that. The heart of this story though is about the artist inspiration a ...( read more)muse can give a person.
  • codyfranklin2
    February 18, 2008
    codyfranklin2
    Nice romantic movie and visually stunning. Dieterle's work has always been innovated and this film is no exception. Very entertaing.
  • pvtexmex
    September 30, 2009
    pvtexmex
    first saw this movie on black and white TV (I was very young), and was enchanted by the story. It wasn't until I bought the DVD that I realized that the movie is in black and white with color tinting in some segments. Only the last scene is in full technicolor. I love very styliz...( read more)ed movies, and this one certainly qualifies. The story, about two people in love who live in slightly different times is intriguing. Jennifer Jones gives a great performance, maturing from a young girl into a young woman. One of my all-time favorites since the first time I saw it so many years ago.
  • Ghw12158
    August 17, 2009
    Ghw12158
    weird but good-great cast
  • jfvirey
    April 9, 2009
    jfvirey
    "A Portrait of Jennie" is roughly "The Ghost and Mrs Muir" in reverse, with the man being the flesh and blood character, and the woman, the haunting apparition. But while I remember loving the 1947 movie more than twenty years ago, I was rather unaffected by this 1948 follow-up. ...( read more)

    Dieterle uses every trick in the book to make his film look magical: from the use of very soft focus to give Jennifer Jones some sort of ethereal beauty to that of monochrome filters and even colour film to make some sequences stand out, placing some sort of mesh in front of the camera to give the impression that some of the shots are moving canvasses (a rather clunky device), and drowning the whole film in Dimitri Tiomkin's heavy-handed reworking of themes from Debussy. Paradoxically, the film uses matte paintings, models and sets for its more supernatural scenes, as if reality was not good enough for the kind of magic it aspires to, but the location shots in New York are actually the most atmospheric, while the studio and SFX shots look inevitably fake to the modern eye.

    The story itself has an interesting premise. But I think that, despite its attempts to elevate itself to a philosophical reflection on time and eternity, life and death (complete with on-screen quotes from Euripides abd Keats and a reading from 1 Kings 11-12), it is a mere projection of the longings of middle-aged men (Cotten was 43) who fall in love with little girls (Jennifer Jones is supposed to be a child in the first encounter, though of course, being 29 at the time, she was not altogether convincing), and wish they could soon become of marrying age. (I have no idea why Cotten's character is called Eben, but in Hebrew, "eben" means stone, and at the beginning of the film, his art is said to be lacking because he does not love what he paints, also, Eben is composed of the words for father and son, which might give some sort of Freudian resonance to the film...)

    I was a bit annoyed by the rather sexist undertone of the movie. Jones's character is a bit vapid as an object of desire, and giving her a foil in the form of a seventy-year old spinster named Ms Spinney was a bit too much for me.

    As for the depiction of the nunnery, although it was rather sympathetic, one gets the impression that the nuns are there only for the purity and Shangri-La quality of their environment, while the film insists that Jennie is not, repeat not a Catholic, but is worth more than the other girls anyway, because she is very sensitive to the beauty of Catholic ritual (what with the veils and all that) and, as the quote from Keats has established, "truth is beauty" (which also gives a philosophical alibi to the older man's attraction to his lolita.)

    This said, the movie is not a total disaster, and made me curious to read the short novel it was adapted from. Although I am rather fond of Jennifer Jones, I do wish Hollywoood would produce a remake, a complete "re-imagining" as they call it, aiming at psychological truth rather than cheap romantic cliches. I wonder for instance what the screenwriters and director of "Birth" could make of such a premise.
  • andygale1
    January 12, 2009
    andygale1
    I liked this mysterious movie. It is unique and interesting.
  • colette951
    April 22, 2008
    colette951
    A real classic, mysterious, full of adventure and Romance.. You cant get movies that compare with one like this now days!
  • moviegirl50
    September 27, 2007
    moviegirl50
    I forgot all about this movie and just came across it--I need to watch it again, it's been so long. I remember it was mysterious--I liked it.

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Portrait of Jennie Trivia

  • What is one of the ingredients of faith [ one is truth] in Portrait Of Jennie ?  Answer »
  • What scares Jennie in Portrait Of Jennie ?  Answer »
  • What did Eben bring to sell [ at first]to the art gallery in Portrait Of Jennie ?  Answer »
  • What did Jennie do as her and Eben walked in Portrait Of Jennie ?  Answer »
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