Time and Tide

William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie

“What is the difference between a lighthouse and an ocean on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, photographically, is not clear to me.”
David O Selznick

Eben: If she had made it to the lighthouse she might have been saved. Isn’t that so?
Eke: Yeah. [pause] But she didn’t make it.

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It’s a simple story. In Central Park on a winter evening in 1934 a failing artist briefly encounters a little girl building a snowman. She leaves behind a parcel, a scarf wrapped in a newspaper from 1910, then disappears, reappearing at intervals over the next few months, each time a little older until she is fully grown. The story becomes a tale about love yearning to vanquish time, until the pair are finally and irretrievably parted by the tidal wave of a hurricane. But the artist has painted a wonderful portrait of the girl which is eventually hung in a great gallery and fascinates visitors from all over the world.

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FARAWAY SO CLOSE -- Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie

​How does this initially unsuccessful film speak to us now? Is it about an elemental battle between the imperatives of linear time and those of human desire? Or art transcending mortality? Or a flawed celebration of earlier cinematic forms and tropes just before they disappeared from memory? Or is it just Hollywood’s pretentious and mawkish trial run for Vertigo, as its producer’s biographer thought? Or today might we even find in it an unwitting early warning that climate change will ravage the future of our children?
 
It is debated whether Portrait of Jennie is a ghost story or not, but it is certainly haunted. Haunted from the past by the history of its own production and that of its makers and by the tropes and visual techniques of silent film and earlier media. And haunted from its future by Scottie diving into the Bay, by the nameless protagonist of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), by the threads of the uncanny and transcendent that surface in the films of Neil Jordan, Julio Medem, and Christian Petzold, and by Hurricane Katrina smashing mercilessly through the levees. It’s a product of the stardust machine in the west, haunted and tugged eastwards by the forlorn call of the Old World and older ways of telling stories.

With the German born émigré William Dieterle as director and with Jennifer Jones cast as the mysterious girl, Jennie Appleton, and Joseph Cotton as the artist, Eben Adams, work on the production began in Autumn 1946.

​The cinematographer was Joe August, a great veteran of the silent era who had worked on over forty films since 1916, including several William S Hart and John Ford westerns, Dieterle’s own Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and his fantasy film The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941). Westerns had taught August to photograph skies and open spaces with a consummate eloquence that is one of the enduring delights of Portrait of Jennie. He died suddenly while completing the film and so also haunts the film as, in both senses, an illuminating spirit.
 
Though set in the mid-1930s, the film makes visual reference to the previous decade and the late silents. Joe August used vintage lenses for some of the photography, mimicking the soft halo effect which older viewers in 1948 would associate with romantic melodramas they had enjoyed twenty years earlier such as Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March. Even more boldly, the film is black and white until the great hurricane at the climax of the story starts. Then a terrific bolt of green lightning bisects the screen during which the aspect ratio has opened out from 4:3 to widescreen.  (Available discs include the colour effects but not the ratio switch)

​The spectacular storm which follows, Eben and Jennie’s final fatal reunion at the foot of the lighthouse, and the subsequent short scene, then use expressive colour tinting and toning in the style of silent films. Then the stock finally switches to full colour when we see the finished portrait in the gallery. So Portrait of Jennie is also self-consciously haunted by its stylistic antecedents.

THOSE IN PERIL — left: Jennie slips away; right: Allegorical religious postcard C.1904 (detail)

​Storms at sea, shipwrecks, and daring lighthouse rescues were the stock in trade of Victorian stage melodrama and magic lantern shows, and the tropes associated with them run through into the era of silent film so would have been familiar to many in the early audiences for Portrait of Jennie. The allegorical religious painting Rock of Ages by Johannes Oertel showing a near-drowned woman being saved from a sea storm by a divine figure was widely known in innumerable derivative versions and is still on offer at tattooists to this day.   

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​FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK?
Plenty of haunting, then. But should we consider the film as akin to a fairytale (wonder tale) rather than as bedfellow to psychological ghost stories such The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944), The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)?
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​The homelands of what we now think of as traditional European fairytales, like that of much of the talent that found its way to the American studios in the 1930s and ‘40s, were Germany and France, where the process of collecting and publishing the tales was consolidated, along with an inclination to sanitise them (which Disney, for one, did not neglect to inherit).
 
In a fairytale, things are the way they are because the tale says so. If a tree can talk but a horse cannot, that’s how it is. In novels and films, even if the subject is fantastic, we are primed to look for an internal logic and to consider them flawed if the logic doesn't hold.

Cineastes and folklorists of a psychoanalytical persuasion will find plenty to bite on in Portrait of Jennie, not least because of Eben’s pride in his drawings of the Lands End Lighthouse and Jennie’s revulsion from them, together with their final and irrevocable parting at exactly that location amid a tumultuous explosion of sea spray — symbolism as evident as any in Little Red Riding Hood.
 
Jennie, like most of the girls at the heart of a fairytale, seeks and deserves true love and must experience setbacks and undergo transformations in the hope of achieving it – a transformation first into adulthood and then, by way of a death that she has already died once, into tranquillity within the memories of others. Eben must similarly endure onerous delays and undertake puzzling and eventually heroic tasks to fulfil his destiny and become the man he has the potential to be.
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The patronage of a fairy godmother who appears at crucial junctures, the gallery owner Miss Spinney, both determines Eben’s obstacles and assists him to overcome them.

YOU SHALL GO TO THE ART GALLERY — Miss Spinney (Ethel Barrymore)

His course is intermittently guided (to use the taxonomy of the folk tale formalists) by magical helpers or agents such the little dog of gallery co-owner Mr Mathews, which runs away in the Park and finds Eben just when he needs to be found. In a premonitory echo of the ocean, the dog is named Skipper. “He doesn’t usually take to strangers” remarks Mr Mathews, adding “Unless he thinks they’re in trouble.” 

More crucially, the magical agent of Jennie’s scarf, which remains in Eben’s world after Jennie is taken from him forever, provides apparent material evidence that she existed and that she loved him.

MAGICAL AGENTS — Jennie's scarf; Skipper the dog

​The film, however, is short of an obvious villain, except perhaps in the abstract form of Eben’s internal demons and of the cruel blows that time inflicts on love. The source novel has a clear candidate — the landlady Mrs Jekes, the sharpness of her name offering an early hint as to her character. Habitually harassing the penniless Eben for his rent, she eventually discovers Jennie (who in the novel is as real to her as to Eben) visiting the artist in his room. She vindictively ejects Jennie and serves Eben with notice, although the pair seem to have been doing nothing less innocent than fantasising about visiting Paris.

In the film Mrs Jekes (Florence Bates), although still firmly pursuing the rent, is a more benevolent character who admits to her gossipy friend that she indulges Eben on account of his good looks. 

ALWAYS RENT DAY — Eben hoping to avoid Mrs Jekes (Florence Bates, with Esther Somers)

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TROUBLE AT T’LIGHTHOUSE
Portrait of Jennie was supposed to be an uncomplicated project for the highly regarded and powerful producer of Gone with the Wind, David O Selznick. It was not.
 
Right from the word go, the Benzedrine-popping workaholic Selznick worried away at the script and the shooting schedule like a dog whose bone had fallen through a grating. He hired and fired scriptwriters and revised their work, seeking to discover a generic internal logic within a source story whose principle charm and strength is that it has none.
 
As photography began on Portrait of Jennie at various New York and East Coast locations in February 1947 Selznick was simultaneously seeing to the wrapping up of Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947). Eventually, alarmed by escalating costs for what he regarded as meagre results, beset by major crises in his private and financial affairs, Selznick ordered the Portrait shoot back from the European-facing East Coast to his comfort zone of the Hollywood studio and milieu.

He was certainly right that the almighty hurricane scene at the climax of the film could only have been achieved by process work in a major studio and not at the seaside. But in any case the Hollywood mindset was that the moguls had not invested the hard-earned capital of their grandparents just so that their minions could waste weeks over on the eastern seaboard fooling around sitting in hotels waiting for the weather to get worse.
 
The recall of the Jennie shoot to Hollywood is a trace re-enactment in miniature of the imperatives that hauled the entire nascent industry west from New York in the first place. Joseph Cotton (1987), remembering his relief when the cast and crew returned to Hollywood, succinctly celebrates: “Home, sun, studio hours. Special effects”.
 
As the costs spiralled out of control Selznick’s personal, financial, and reputational problems became insurmountable. The film was too far advanced to cancel, and too far from completion to avoid exponential cost inflation. Hauling the production west to Hollywood, Selznick found himself loaded into a catapult of misfortune that would soon propel him and his remaining career all the way east to the Old World and to directors such as Carol Reed and Michael Powell who were more than capable of ignoring his blizzards of memos and getting on with their jobs as they saw fit.

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GARDEN OF EBEN
In printed form the name of the artist Eben Adams is obviously, indeed prosaically, suggestive of the biblical Eden and the first man. And Eben’s very own Eve, Jennie Appleton, has the name of the forbidden fruit as her surname’s emphatic component. The first person text of the novel, and therefore Eben’s conscious thought, is intermittently bothered by the Judeo-Christian God -- as when Gus, the Jewish taxi driver (Irish in the film) engages with the artist in homespun theological musings.
 
In the film this strain of the sacred is secularised into portentous dialogue and narrative-voice speculation about the nature of existence, time, and love, likely with an eye to frictionless distribution. The reassignment of Gus’s origins to Ireland enables a lyrical scene in which he plays a harp and sings a plaintive song, “Yonder, yonder”, again pointing us towards the European homelands and evoking popular associations of Celtic themes with the folkloric supernatural.
 
The exteriors in the film and what we see through the windows of the interiors frequently reminds us of the natural world — a wintry Central Park and the buildings of New York shot to recall painted landscapes, a formation of ducks pursuing an ancient migration route heedless of the recently established city, sheep grazing the Park in spring.
 
“Landscapes… landscapes” tuts Mr Mathews the first time he reviews Eben’s portfolio, as if the very word was an affront to his gallery’s Manhattan business model. More kindly, and with a view to both keeping a grip on Eben’s fate and enabling him to work, Miss Spinney commissions a flower painting. Nature, but cut and arranged to suit the parlour.

​A little way into the story, Eben is commissioned to paint a mural in Mr Moore’s Alhambra diner in exchange for free meals, so saving him from starvation. In the novel, the mural is a bucolic scene of a group of clothed women at a picnic in a verdant lakeside landscape --“It has to be clean”, insists Mr Moore.
 
In the film the mural’s subject becomes a heroic celebration of the Irish Nationalist soldier and statesman Michael Collins, killed in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. This switch provides the film with a boisterous unveiling scene and an artwork with more dynamic impact than the novel’s sedentary picnic scene, but one that disrupts the centrality of the natural realm in landscape-specialist Eben’s imaginative world.
 
It would be whimsical to think that any of the key creators of Portrait of Jennie gave a second thought to Anthropocene climate damage while making the film. But viewed today their work is eerily if subliminally insistent throughout that it is nature that intersects our lives and give us licence to succeed in our purposes, and not the other way round. And the climactic tidal wave has all too vivid resonances of the climate change catastrophes that increasing populate our headlines. 

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ARTIST OF THE PORTRAIT
Hollywood in the mid 20th century, ever mindful that the indulgence of art has the capacity to hinder commerce, usually plays safe when dealing with painting (unless making a populist point about “modern art”) and often depicts it as a representational craft that either produces a workable likeness or doesn’t. Hence Midge’s ill advised self-portrait in Vertigo is a technically less accomplished copy of the Carlotta Valdes portrait with Midge’s own bespectacled features and fuller figure substituted, but with little suggestion of creative stylistic divergence or originality of technique.
 
Writing his novel, Robert Nathan had the advantage that Eben’s paintings and drawings remain safely in the imagination of each reader, whereas the filmmakers were obliged to give them physical form and hence make aesthetic decisions about the artist’s style and competency. The audience could perhaps be allowed to see very little of the landscapes and sketches Eben manages to sell to the gallery early in the story, but a film will inevitably have to give the audience a gratifying sight of the titular portrait itself, both in progress and when finished.
 
Selznick was to marry Jones shortly following the completion of the film. The painting we see is a portrait of the film star Jennifer Jones, commissioned by her lover David O Selznick and painted to order by Robert Brackman, with a secondary function as a film prop representing the fictitious Eben Adams’ portrait of the fictitious (and possibly illusory) Jennie Appleton.
 
Brackman was a well regarded painter and a respected teacher, capable of producing compelling if relatively conventional portraits. While he refused point blank to move his studio to Hollywood to execute the Selznick commission, it seems likely that he was subject to a level of the producer’s usual assiduous micro-specification, indeed Joseph Cotton records that Selznick sent Brackman daily memos.
 
The portrait described in the novel depicts, is indeed titled, a Girl in a Black Dress. It is safe to speculate that Selznick, having long-term proprietorial claims on both the oil painting and the sitter, required Brackman to refrain from delivering anything too spooky.
 
Whatever the case, the dull and docile appearance of the girl in the portrait when we finally see it hanging in the Metropolitan Museum struggles to find defenders, even among admirers of the film. While Brackman’s technical rendering of surfaces and light is highly competent, as a key narrative component of the film any force that the portrait delivers stems almost exclusively from the fact that the stock switches to full colour as we see it.

LOOK AT IT THIS WAY — Eben nervously shows the unfinished painting to his patrons.
Photographs of Robert Brackman's precious portrait in progress were used on set.

​In the novel, Jennie appears at Eben’s studio for a portrait sitting in the bridal white uniform of her convent school instead of in her signature black dress. Eben is momentarily disappointed, but remarks that he can always finish the dress without her there. Furthermore, he searches out a length of old yellow silk he bought during his student days in Paris (another fragment of the Old World) draping it behind Jennie and then placing an old black coat of his own over her. The absence of the golden background and the substitution of the black dress by the white garment in Brackman’s portrait compounds the failure of the painting’s appearance to deliver either wonder or catharsis — a fundamental failure inevitably stemming from the sentimental and submissive pose in which Jones is placed, wholly at odds with Jennie Appleton’s defining characteristics of determination and mystery.

A feature of a strikingly compelling portrait is that it should embody a question, an enigma. This is often achieved by establishing a direct eye line between sitter and viewer. Who am I? And who are you? In the words of Jennie’s song — “Where I come from nobody knows, and where I’m going everything goes.”

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU — Leonardo da Vinci; Johannes Vermeer; Romaine Brooks

This direct gaze is at the root of the status of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and, for that matter, the chocolate box popularity of Frans Hal’s Laughing Cavalier, and it seems unlikely that Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring would be so well known, or would have inspired Tracy Chevalier’s novel, if the subject had been shown with downcast eyes looking at the floor to our right.

It might be expected that filmmakers, of all people, would have grasped the opportunity to position the painted Jennie to haunt our memories by breaking the fourth wall and offering the direct gaze of her “big sad eyes” in poignant exchange with ours. Tantalisingly, the film contains a shot of Jones posing for the portrait a few frames of which come close to exactly that.

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​SUPER TROUPERS  — LILLIAN GISH AND ETHEL BARRYMORE
Eben, having met once with the teenage Jennie at her convent school, returns to speak to her favourite teacher, Mother Mary of Mercy, to see if she can offer him any leads to find Jennie.
 
And here in a sun-dappled cloister, radiating calm from serene features perfectly framed by her nun’s headdress, comes Lillian Gish.

The word “legendary” is sometimes applied carelessly to movie people, but it would be churlish to deny it to Gish. She cultivated her own version of conquering time, maintaining a lifelong vagueness about her exact age and the supposedly aristocratic French origins of her surname. Born in the nineteenth century she made her stage debut as a child at the dawn of the twentieth, made her final film (another Atlantic coast drama) Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August in 1986, and died in 1993. She had wanted the great African-American baritone and actor Paul Robeson to recite the twenty-third psalm at her funeral, but she had outlived him by almost two decades.

LILLIAN GISH (left to right) — Broken Blossoms; The Wind; Way Down East

​Like Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie, Gish had as a young adult convincingly played a troubled and doomed child, in DW Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1920). Her appearance in Portrait of Jennie also carries resonances of young women battered by extreme weather events: in Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928) buffeted mercilessly by a choking and toxic studio sandstorm, and in DW Griffith’s Way Down East whirling helplessly in an actual blizzard before being carried across ice floes wearing only a dress by a terrified (but fur coated) Richard Barthelmess.

Her headdress in Portrait of Jennie functions diegetically to identify her as a nun but also isolates her features, providing (cut-out doll like) a blank template on which subliminal recall of the Gish career can be hung, whether by the original audiences or today’s film history enthusiasts. Paula Marantz Cohen (2001) identifies Lillian Gish’s DW Griffith films as crucial to the emergence of the centrality of the close-up in screen narrative codes. Gish’s costume in Jennie ensures that even in medium-shot her distinctive face is isolated as in close-up.

Like Lillian Gish, Ethel Barrymore was a child of the nineteenth century theatre but from a more established and less impoverished family. Older than Gish, she was appearing on stage in both the USA and Britain by the turn of the century, so came directly and contemporaneously from the milieu of Jennie Appleton’s tragic parents.

ETHEL BARRYMORE — Postcard (c.1908) and in The Spiral Staircase (Siodmak, 1945)

With her strong features, warm piercing eyes, and her distinctive voice and delivery, with just sufficient trace of theatrical declamation, Barrymore was ideally cast to embody Miss Spinney's blend of authority and shrewd kindness tinged with melancholy. 
 
Lee Kovacs (1999), advocating for the film as a ghost story, closely analyses the supernatural resonances of both novel and film and places Barrymore’s Miss Spinney character as a presiding spirit medium. Gem Wheeler (2019) also points out that Miss Spinney, rather than Eben or Jennie, is the true protagonist of the film. Watching the film in the light of these propositions, it is clear that Spinney has more consistent agency than either Eben or Jennie. Her first appearance is a high angle back view as Eben visits the gallery to try to sell his landscapes. Unnoticed by Eben, who has arrived in haste without an appointment and turns directly away from camera towards Mr Mathews’s desk, Spinney seems, sentinel like, to have been lying in wait for Eben and only moves into the action when her intervention will prevent him leaving empty handed.

ARTFUL — The camera's privileged first view of Miss Spinney, unnoticed by Eben. 

Her subsequent appearances at key moments in the drama are suggestive of a fairy godmother figure, a guide who functions in liminal relation to the action like the Ringmaster in Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955). We are told by Eben after Spinney’s appearance in the Park that she can’t see Jennie. But do we take his testimony in this respect (or indeed in any other) as reliable? After Jennie’s final disappearance he presses Spinney to confirm that she believes in Jennie’s existence and she replies equivocally that all that matters is that he does-- exactly the response we might expect from a dea ex-machina who had magiced Jennie into Eben’s life in the first place.

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REGULAR GUY — JOSEPH COTTEN
Cotten, the sound of whose name holds connotations of both comforting softness and the dark history of the Trade, was perhaps the ideal American everyman for this depression era tale. The actor’s air of slight bewilderment at finding himself playing whatever role he does happen to be playing makes him a perfect fit for Eben Adams.
 
His autobiography (1987), which he insists is entirely self-penned, is a diligent chronological catalogue of events and show business anecdotes which provides limited insight into his motivations or inner ​life.

Although habitually reliable and professional on set, Cotten doesn’t seem to have overburdened himself with character preparation. Engaged to play an Irishman in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, he arrived at the shoot unsure as to whether he could articulate what would pass for an Irish accent, perhaps calculating that he had a reasonable chance of making a better shot at it than his co-star, Ingrid Bergman.

​In preparation for playing Eben Adams in Portrait, Cotten travelled to Brackman’s studio on Long Island Sound to study the painter at work. He made notes of “two or three” of Brackman’s habits, which doesn’t suggest an extended or painstaking level of research. But then we see almost nothing of the actual application of paint in the film. Cotten was, though, particularly struck that when Brackman wished to review his work from more distance, rather than taking a pace or two backwards, the artist bent his body back into a gravity defying arc. Triumphantly reproducing this curious antic on the shoot, Cotten was respectfully directed to desist.
 
His account of appearing in Portrait gives little insight into his perception of the story or his character’s motivations. But he comments on the universality of occasional brief experiences of the apparent collapse of time and he does seem to have been touched and intrigued by the question of whether, as he puts it, Jennie exists.
 
Commenting that Eban “never exhibits a violent, exaggerated display of emotion” Kovacs (1999) sees him as a ghostly figure “less alive than Jennie”. While there is considerable truth in this, it is to Cotten and Dieterle’s credit that the actor’s self effacing capacity was so effectively harnessed in the role. James Stewart, for example, would likely have over-emoted the part into oblivion. We can imagine Willem Defoe or Bruno Ganz as effective occupants of Eben Adams, but not Tom Cruise. Laurence Olivier, who with Vivian Leigh might at one stage actually have been cast in Jennie, could no doubt have done the obsession very well, but could he have done the self-effacing introversion as well as Cotten?

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HELPERS — ​John Farrell; Felix Bressart; Maude Simmons

​FINDING TIME
Eben: Do you think it’s possible that there might have been others in other times whom we might have loved, and might have loved us?
Jennie: Oh, no. No-one else. Of all the people who’ve lived from world’s end to world’s end there’s just one you must love, one you must seek until you find him.

Searching for traces of Jennie’s parents The Flying Appletons, killed in a high wire accident in 1910, Eben enquires first of a mature cop (John Farrell) who knows nothing but can direct him to someone who might, a vaudeville old timer called Pete (Felix Bressart), a one time song-and-dance man now working as stage doorman at the Rialto Cinema. Pete sits at the rear of the screen, dwarfed by the dancing images of the medium that has replaced him. He boasts of a good memory “but sometimes forgets things”.
 
To answer Eban’s query about 1910, Pete has to laboriously count aloud through a decade of years, recalling various acts by the name of Appleton. In a comical mirroring of Jennie’s quest, Eben impatiently urges Pete to hurry more quickly through the years.
 
“Please!” responds the old man, “Let me do it my way. I have to go backwards and then start from the beginning, you see. Otherwise I will not remember and I don’t like not to remember”.
 
Finally recalling the Flying Appletons, Pete suggests that Eben visits the former wardrobe mistress of Hammersteins Music Hall, a woman named Clara Morgan, remarking “Those coloured people, very wise people. They know what trouble is.”  This is surely not only a generalised observation. The comment may simply be implying that if anyone knows all about the Appletons accident then Clara will, but it is alluring to read it as a suggestion that Pete's intermittent memory can glimpse the future as well as the past, and he senses that Eben’s quest will end in doom.
 
Clara (Maude Simmons), a hospitable woman with an alert and accessible memory, receives Eban in her homely sitting room and produces her Hammersteins Music Hall scrap book, easily locating cuttings concerning Jennie’s parents. A loose photo of Jennie as a child in her black dress drops out of the book and Clara identifies her as the Appletons’ daughter. Eben pleads that she must be mistaken and this must in fact be their granddaughter. Assured that this is not so, he dazedly takes his leave and we see that torrential rain is lashing at Clara’s window, prefiguring the hurricane that Eben’s enquiries have just drawn him a step nearer to.

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THE WAVE
Eke: It was a wave alright. Sometimes I think I never seen it. That I just read about it, like somethin’ in the Scriptures. It come up out of the sea like a mountain, comin’, comin’, toward the land. Like a day of judgement.

​In the novel there is an extended Cape Cod interlude of several months between Eban placing the completed portrait in Spinney and Mathews' hands and his final reunion with Jennie in the hurricane.

​Cape Cod, that finger of America pointing or beckoning to Europe, is Eben’s spiritual home and the place to which he gravitates to seek resolution or destiny. In both novel and film, as he says goodbye to Spinney before leaving New York she asks him to paint her a picture of a little white church and warns him, with pointed explicitness, against drowning in the sea.
 
The novel recounts how Eben stays briefly with his friend Arne and then rents a small house (“a shack really”) perched above the ocean. He immerses himself in the natural world, observing with the eye of an artist, as well as what we would call an environmentalist, the colours and textures of plants, the skies, the earth, and the sea, the eternal cyclical changes of season and climate. Arne, by contrast, is meanwhile creating a painting of a new power station, believing such a subject to be the true future for art.
 
Although Eben’s sojourn in nature is undisturbed and brings him some inner quietude, there is an undercurrent of anxiety that runs through this penultimate section of Nathan’s novel. Eben knows that Jennie will —must— return to him, but he does not know when. A different film than Dieterle’s would have included some representation of this extended retreat from the city, and it may be that this was scripted at some stage but never included, or that such a quiet contemplative interlude so late in a film was simply a non-starter in Selznick’s creative orbit.
 
So in the film there is no long summer of contemplation and immersion in the natural world. A few seconds of stock train footage brings Eben hot-foot overnight to the fog bound coast.  Before he can obtain a small boat, he must pass a trio of gatekeepers mirroring the three who directed his earlier passage of discovery into theatreland – the authority figure (the Cop), the guide to remembrance (Pete) and the wise witness (Clara). Here these are replaced by Captain Cobb (Clem Bevans), the seasoned mariner who consults the barometer and confidently denies the possibility of a hurricane; his nameless bespectacled companion (Robert Dudley) who remembers that the 1920s hurricane indeed arrived without warning; and the boatman Eke (Henry Hull), who knew Jennie and witnessed the events surrounding her drowning in the hurricane.

Eke, a silhouette in a heavy mariner's coat and a sou’wester hat that shadows his features almost to invisibility, is seen against a luminous grey wall of fog. His obscured appearance and the strangely accented, drawn-out, delivery of his lines suggest that he might be a folkloric figure inhabiting another strand of time. Eben, too, is little more than a silhouette as he presses the old boatman for details of the fatal night, giving this scene the aura of a shadowplay, a scene from a Lotte Reiniger fantasy re-enacted in the visual codes of film noir.

As a slightly choppy sea develops into a heavy storm Eben’s tiny sailing craft reaches the massive, eerily abandoned, lighthouse. Cast onto the rocks, he enters the unlocked structure, runs to the top, and desperately calls out against the storm for Jennie. At last he sees her little boat, tacking across an uncannily calm patch of water at a distance. The storm becomes a savage hurricane and the sea boils up as Jennie is wrecked at the base of the lighthouse. Eben pulls her out of the water and they are reunited on the rocks in a brief moment of intense passion. Eben entreats her to come with him to the safety of the lighthouse. If viewed realistically, this escape might just be logistically possible, but they are so rapt in intense desire that they fail to move to safety soon enough. The mountainous tidal wave rears up and overwhelms them.
 
It has been suggested (Kovacs 1999) that Eben’s small craft is simply caught in an ordinary squall and dashed onto the lighthouse rocks and that the whole hurricane and reunion with Jennie may be a hallucination he suffers as a result of the blow. Like the so-called Owl Creek reading of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this is ingenious but in the case of Jennie isn’t it superfluous? Neither melodrama nor fairytales demand explanations for their events. As Charles Barr (2002) says of the glaringly improbable plot points in Vertigo, their plausibility is “poetic and psychological rather than literal.”
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The lurid green tinting of the hurricane gives way to soft warm tones as we briefly see a calm sea lapping the shore and the distant lighthouse while flocks of birds cruise gently overhead. Eben lies in a bed, tended by Captain Cobb, who is just finishing giving him a shave. A visitor appears and sits beside the bed, Miss Spinney. Eben anxiously asks if anyone else was found when he was saved and insists there was a second boat, but Captain Cobb is adamant that there was no one else at sea in the hurricane.

Eben despairs, but then notices that Spinney is holding a scarf which she says was found beside Eben when he was rescued. Jennie's scarf.

A brief coda in the Metropolitan Museum tells us that Eben has become a renowned artist and that his recognition began with his painting Portrait of Jennie. Three museum visitors, teenage girls, discuss whether the sitter was a real person and decide that she must at least have been real to the artist. A smiling Miss Spinney appears for the last time and commends the girls for their wisdom. Then we see Robert Brackman's portrait of Jennifer Jones in full Technicolor.

But you may prefer instead to close your eyes and imagine Eben Adams' painting Girl in a Black Dress, a piece of yellow French silk hung behind her and with her big sad eyes staring straight into yours.

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Selznick’s biographer David Thomson (1993) is decisively no admirer of Portrait of Jennie, which he says finds its “eventual realisation” in Vertigo in which “love is turned to madness.”  He hypothesises that Jennie (if it had to be made at all) should have been a silent film or a film “in a foreign language”. This rather gives the game away. It isn’t modern enough, it isn’t American enough. It’s an old film, a European film, it’s in the wrong place, as if its American and European émigré creators had made it by mistake.

Bernard Hermann, later the composer of Vertigo’s Wagner-inflected music, was first choice to score Portrait of Jennie but he was sidelined during production in favour of Russian émigré and one time silent film pianist Dimitri Tiomkin, who provided arrangements of yearning Debussy themes, conjuring shades of Vaslav Nijinsky rather than Kirsten Flagstad. We should be thankful for this decision which, like Joe August’s sublime photography, draws us gently into the realm of “once upon a time” and holds us there. 

​Marina Warner (2014), considering modern fairytale films such as Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011) and Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (2012), proposes that the unambiguous ‘happy’ ending consisting of marriage and lifelong contentment is no longer a viable component of fairytale and that fairytale films are increasingly intended for adult audiences. The feisty orphan Blancanieves achieves vibrancy, respect, and recognition in life, but ends the film shut in her glass coffin as a shoddy, fetishistic, sideshow attraction.

WONDERTALE — Macarena García in Blancanieves (Pablo Berger, 2012)

​Portrait of Jennie also doesn’t have a conventional happy-ever-after ending for its leads. But its internal world is restored to equilibrium for the time being, with Eben recognised as the renowned artist that his talents warrant and Jennie returned to her graceful place within the memories of her sanguine elders, Clara the chronicler of Vaudeville and Eke the boatman.

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REFERENCES
Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: her legendary life. 2001.
Barr, Charles. Vertigo. 2002
Cotten, Joseph. An Autobiography: vanity will get you somewhere. 1987.
George Eastman Museum: Portrait of Jennie: The Rarest Cinematic Experience of All Time (accessed 21/04/21)
https://youtu.be/xh2oyrWmUf8
Kovacs, Lee. The Haunted Screen: ghosts in literature and film. 1999.
Maratz Cohen, Paula. Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth. 2001.
Nathan, Robert. Portrait of Jennie. 1940
Propp, V (trans. Scott, L). Morphology of the Folktale. 1958/2015.
Thomson, David. Showman: the life of David O Selznick. 1993.
Warner, Marina. Once Upon a Time: a short history of the fairytale. 2014.
Wheeler, Gem. Portrait of Jennie remains one of Hollywood’s strangest melodramas. (Publ: 6/5/2019. Accessed 14/04/21)
https://lwlies.com/articles/portrait-of-jennie-william-dieterle-hollywood-melodrama/
Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: the unknown history of fairytale films. 2011.

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