PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948, aka JENNIE & TIDAL

WAVE) film review

John A. Walker (Copyright 2009)

An exceptionally weird and atmospheric American film that failed on its first release

in December 1948 – reviews were negative and cinemas were empty - but which has

since come to be regarded as a classic of the fantasy genre. It was made by The

Selznick Studio/Vanguard Films Production at a cost of $4 million and filmed in

black-and-white apart from two tinted sequences and a brief colour sequence at the

very end. Joseph H. August, who died during the course of production, was the

principal cinematographer responsible for the high quality filming, which included

tonal silhouettes of skyscrapers contrasted against the sun’s glare. (Photographs

that Alfred Stieglitz [1864-1946] took in 1903 of a snowbound New York probably

inspired some shots.)

Stills from Portrait of Jennie. Images may be subject to copyright.

To achieve halo-like effects, August resorted to antique lenses because modern ones

were too sophisticated. Location shooting, which took place in New York and Graves

Lighthouse, off Boston Harbour, began in February 1947 and the film was

completed in Hollywood in October 1948. The New York settings included Central

Park in wintertime, The Cloisters (a Museum of Medieval Art in Fort Tyron Park

on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River) in springtime, and the Metropolitan

Museum of Art. Apart from a scene set in a crowded Irish bar and an ice-skating

scene in Central Park, New York appears curiously devoid of people.

Leonardo Bercovici and others wrote the screenplay, which was based on a ghost

story by novelist and poet Robert Nathan (1894-1985) published by A.A. Knopf of

New York in 1940.

Nathan, it seems, had been influenced by J.W. Dunne’s theories of dreams and the
nature of time explored in his book An Experiment with Time (1927). There are

significant differences between the Nathan’s story and the plot of the film.

Unusually for a ghost film, many scenes took place out of doors during the day and

horror and graveyards were eschewed.

The film begins with a portentous prologue consisting of shots of boiling clouds

accompanied by a God-like commentary written by screenwriter and playwright

Ben Hecht plus quotations from Euripides and Keats about such generalities as life,

death, hope, space, time, beauty and truth. The statement: ‘Time does not pass but

curves around us and the past and present are together at our side forever’ indicate

an awareness of modern physics and the General Theory of Relativity. There is then

a shot of the exterior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, we are informed, a

portrait has been shown, which will be the subject of the film.

The story takes place during 1934 when the United States was in the grip of an

economic depression. A struggling figurative painter called Eban or Eben Adams –

who supplies a voice-over narrative in which he admits being depressed by the

world’s indifference to him and his work - visits a private art gallery overlooking

Central Park (this gallery never seems to have any customers) to show two art

dealers his portfolio of landscapes and still lives, which are judged ordinary. Miss

Spinney, an elderly art dealer (played by the veteran actress Ethel Barrymore) takes

pity on Eben and buys a flower painting. She comments that his work lacks love.

Afterwards, while walking through a snow-covered and desolate Central Park at

dusk, Eben encounters a girl called Jennie Appleton building a snowman by herself.

She seems to be from the past because she is dressed in antique clothes and mentions
a theatre where her parents are performing that Eben knows has been demolished.

Evidently, Jennie is capable of time travel. Whenever they meet over the next few

months, Jennie ages until she attains womanhood. The two fall in love but their

romance is poignant because apparently it cannot be fulfilled, initially because it is

between an adult and a child, and later because both are from different eras. Jennie,

however, is convinced that love transcends time and the laws of causality. Her spirit

still haunts the Earth because in her lifetime she never experienced the love of a

man.

Eben draws Jennie’s portrait from memory and Spinney, who is fast becoming a

friend and confidant, is impressed and her male business partner Matthews (played

by Cecil Kellaway) buys it. Jennie has become Eben’s muse and he finds it difficult

to work in her absence. One evening he arrives back at his rented attic studio and

discovers Jennie waiting. He paints a portrait of her in oils that Spinney and

Matthews view and praise highly just before it is finished. Eben fears that once the

portrait is completed, Jennie will vanish forever.

Film still from Portrait of Jennie. This image may be subject to copyright.
Still from Portrait of Jennie. Image may be subject to copyright.

Investigating Jennie’s history, Eben learns that her parents were high wire jugglers

who died in a fall and that nuns in a convent then looked after and educated her.

From a nun he discovers that Jennie was drowned by a tidal wave during the 1920s

while she was seeking refuge in a lighthouse on rocks at Land’s End, Cape Cod - a

place Eben himself had painted. On an anniversary of the event, Eben travels to the

spot and sets sail in an attempt to rescue her. They meet for one last time on the

rocks during a fierce storm. Eben is unable to save Jennie but his Portrait of Jennie

(1934), displayed in a New York Museum, immortalises her.

Jennie was played by Jennifer Jones (b. 1919, aka Phyllis Isley), who came from a

vaudeville family and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New
York. She moved to Hollywood in 1939 and soon became an Oscar-winning movie

star. Jones had dark hair, an expressive face with large eyes set wide apart,

prominent cheekbones and a wide mouth. She was a nervy and vulnerable

performer who hated publicity. Reviewers have praised her performance as the

otherworldly Jennie as ‘sincere and completely captivating’ and ‘alluring, delicate

and magical’.

Joseph Cotten (1905-94), an ex-member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Players,

played the lonely painter Eben. He was a tall, handsome individual with wavy hair, a

deep sonorous voice and a relaxed acting style. (One critic described him as

‘humdrum’.) However, since the character he plays lacks energy and charisma, the

speed with which Jennie falls for him is hard to swallow and it also difficult to

accept him as an action hero when he battles against the ocean storm. Of course,

since the film is a fantasy, it requires a major suspension of rationality.

The film’s director was William Dieterle (1893-1972), a German-Jewish-born stage

actor who left his homeland in 1929 and whose Hollywood directing career began

the following year. German romanticism was surely an influence on his style because

some of the light effects echo those found in the paintings of Casper David

Friedrich. The mood-enhancing music employed on the soundtrack was written and

conducted by Dimitri Tiomkin after themes by the French composer Claude

Debussy. The film’s producer was David O. Selznick (1902-65) who had established

his own production company Selznick International in 1936 and was famous for the

epic Gone with the Wind (1939). He took a personal interest in the film and its

leading lady (their extra marital affair started in 1941), and ordered reshoots,
rewrites and recuts. Seeking a spectacular climax, he beefed up the storm sequence

and tinted it green (it begins with a startling flash of green lightning). The final

credits were tinted sepia. The storm required special effects that garnered an

Academy Award and in selected cinemas in New York and Los Angeles the

screenings themselves involved cycloramic screens plus multi-sounds, that is, the

screen was enlarged by a factor of three and sounds came from multiple sources.

Robert Brackman, Portrait of Jennie, (1947-48). Copyright Brackman Estate?

The half-length portrait of Jennie Appleton set against a plain background that

Eben paints in the film was a genuine portrait of Jones by a genuine professional

artist called Robert Brackman (1898-1980). The latter was born in Odessa in Russia

and moved to the United States at the age of ten. In New York, he worked as a

lithographer and then became a successful figurative painter and college art
instructor. Selznick commissioned the portrait and it was executed in Brackman’s

studio in Noank, Connecticut. Fifteen sittings were required to finish the painting –

which was photographed at different stages - and Brackman also made a pastel

study of Jennie as a girl. (1)

In his memoirs, Cotten recalls flying to Connecticut to watch Brackman at work.

The artist told Cotten he was sick of seeing ‘actors who knew nothing about

painting making asses of themselves in artist’s smocks and berets, kicking over their

easels and destroying their canvases in raging tantrums’. (2) While playing Eben,

Cotten mimicked some of Brackman’s mannerisms in front of the canvas but the

technical director thought his behaviour inauthentic!

In the oil portrait, which is signed ‘Eben Adams’ not ‘Brackman’, Jennie’s arms

are folded on her lap, her head is tilted a little and she gazes down and to the left so

that her expression is one of inwardness. She wears a light coloured dress with a

high collar and so appears chaste and demure. The painting was executed in a

precise realist style also favoured by such American artists as Grant Wood, Andrew

Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. Naturally, the film presents the prop as a masterpiece

and during the final moments of the film, the camera shows it for a few seconds in

Technicolor. (This sudden switch from monochrome to colour had previously been

employed in the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Although the Mona Lisa is

not featured or mentioned, remarks by the art dealer Matthews that a portrait of a

woman should be eternal evokes the discourse associated with Leonardo’s famous

portrait. Merchandise associated with the film included a jigsaw puzzle of the

portrait manufactured by the Jaymar Speciality Company of New York.

 What the film reiterates are two ancient beliefs: first, ars longa, vita brevis (life is

short, but art endures); and second, the spirit or character of a human being can be

captured and preserved by an image of that person. These beliefs are confirmed by

the fact that life or death masks and painted or sculpted portraits of famous

individuals provide likenesses that have survived for centuries after those

individuals died. Once their bodies have decayed, only their portraits remain as

evidence of what they looked like; hence, portraits become substitutes for their

subjects.

In December 1948, the art magazine American Artist published an illustrated

article about Brackman’s portrait and when the film was re-released in spring 1949,

it was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to help publicise the movie.

Selznick liked the portrait so much he retained it for his personal art collection and

after he married Jones in 1949, it was displayed in their home. (Selznick had

previously bought a Matisse and a Vuillard.) Six years after his death in 1965, Jones

married the multimillionaire businessperson and philanthropist Norton Simon

(1907-93), who was a keen collector of fine art. Before they met, Simon was

unfamiliar with Jones’s film career apart from Portrait of Jennie and it seems he had

been trying to buy the Brackman portrait for his collection. Since 1989, Jones has

presided over the Board of Directors of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena that

possesses art works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Goya, Rembrandt, Rubens and

van Gogh.

Eben Adams, the artist portrayed in this film, is somewhat unusual as a hero

because he not represented as a genius or an innovator but as a mediocre

traditionalist who is capable of only one outstanding work by which he hopes to be

remembered. Moreover, the portrait of the title of the film, is not dependent on his

imagination but on a mysterious muse that arrives from beyond the grave. (Unless,

of course, one thinks Jennie is Eben’s Jungian anima - his inner feminine side -

rather than a supernatural apparition.) Other artists, such as the one portrayed in

Michael Powell’s 1969 film Age of Consent, have preferred muses that were flesh

and blood. Unlike some major modern artists, Eben is not an egoist with a

dominating personality. He has low self-esteem and doubts his artistic abilities. Nor

is he bohemian in dress or lifestyle (he wears a suit and tie, and behaves throughout

like a gentleman). We learn in passing that Eben once studied art in Paris and

through some Irish-American friends, he obtains a commission to paint a

propagandistic mural in a bar depicting the Irish rebel and patriot Michael Collins

armed with a rifle to fight the British. During the 1930s’ depression, many American

artists received support from the Government’s Works Progress Administration and

undertook public mural commissions. However, Eben does not respect this kind of

work; indeed, when the mural is finished he declares it ‘worthless’. During the

1930s, the avant-garde in New York consisted of artists such as Arshile Gorky,

Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning who were later to found the

abstract expressionist movement. These artists interacted with one another and

debated aesthetics, art and politics issues in public meetings and magazines. Eben,

on the other hand, has no contact with other artists or the art world apart from Miss

Spinney and his exhibition at the Met. This is not to say the film is untruthful

because there are probably many traditional artists who eschew bohemianism and
the art world, who live privately and whose careers make little public impact.

In recent years, Portrait of Jennie has prompted much comment and been saluted

as ‘beautiful, imaginative and haunting’, ‘deliriously romantic’, ‘a fragile mood

piece’ and ‘uplifting’. Richard Scheib has pointed out that the film was made shortly

after World War II and that following wars involving major loss of life there is

usually a vogue for afterlife film fantasies to serve the emotional needs of those who

have lost loved ones. (3) Following World War I, spiritualism flourished as people

sought to communicate with the spirits of husbands and sons who had died via

séances conducted by mediums. Lee Kovacs, who has analysed Portrait of Jennie in

detail in a book about ghosts in literature and film, argues persuasively that the

character of Spinney functions as a medium. (4)

Portrait of Jennie is paradoxical because while Eben’s ‘masterpiece’ is nothing

special in terms of fine art, the film’s visual qualities are so exceptional it

approaches the condition of art. This was surely an ambition of the filmmakers

themselves because, as Scheib has observed, ‘At several points the film employs a

fascinating gauzed effect which makes it seem as though the film itself had become

the canvas of an oil painting.’

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(1) A pastel portrait of Jennifer Jones as Jennie (private collection) is reproduced in

colour in Kenneth Bates, Brackman: His Art and Teaching, (Connecticut: Madison

Art Gallery Publishing Company, 2nd edn 1973).

(2) Joseph Cotten, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, (London: Columbus Books,
1987), p. 77.

(3) Richard Scheib, ‘Portrait of Jennie,’

<www.moira.co.nz/fantasy/portraitofjennie.htm>

(4) Lee Kovacs, The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature and Film, (Jefferson, NC

& London: McFarland & Company Inc., 1999), pp. 50-67.

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John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and

Artists on Screen, (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1993).