Jennifer Jones.

"During a long career, celebrated by the Film Society of Lincoln Center this week, [Jennifer] Jones managed to avoid typecasting and appeared in roles ranging from the innocent and saintly to the wild and hysterical, working with a number of major directors - Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, and Vittorio de Sica, to name a few. Yet, never secure with stardom, Jones was driven to pursue it by [David O] Selznick's Svengali-like obsession with her." For the Voice, Elliot Stein previews Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer Jones, running Friday through May 24.

Updated through 5/16.

"The best reason to attend this festival is the resurrection of Jones' Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger film Gone to Earth (1950), which was re-cut by Selznick and released as The Wild Heart," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door:

A comparison between the two cuts reveals Selznick's simplifying impulses...

Selznick was a great producer in the 30s and early 40s, giving valuable first opportunities to Katharine Hepburn, George Cukor, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock, but by the time he met and then married Jones, he had exhausted himself. He created and then thwarted her career, just as Van Heflin's well-meaning but drunk husband spoils Jones' vertiginous waltz in Madame Bovary. Still, Jones is a crucial part of five varied and exceptional films, Cluny Brown, Gone to Earth, Carrie, Ruby Gentry and Beat the Devil, and her fascinating, in some ways morally compromised life operates as a cautionary tale with a partial happy ending.

Earlier: Miriam Bale in Film Comment.

Updates, 5/16: "Blessed with limpid eyes, high cheekbones, and lips that purse devoutly in prayer in her Oscar-winning interpretation of St Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), or splay into a licentious, leering overbite in Vidor's infamous, overheated Duel in the Sun (1946), Ms Jones was a bona fide movie star with the looks to prove it," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "But the lingering, haunting, ephemeral truth she brought to the movies came from deeper within."

Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling recommends William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie, "one of the most haunting Hollywood films of any era."

Posted by dwhudson at May 14, 2008 8:58 AM