PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

On a misty winter evening, the young painter Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) meets a girl in a park, to whom he feels inexplicably attracted. Back in his studio, he reproduces in a lively sketch the physiognomy of the young woman, who said her name was Jennie (Jennifer Jones). The man then sees the girl again and again, for whom he feels a reciprocated affection, but after painting a masterpiece portrait of her, Jennie suddenly disappears. When Eben tries to find her, he discovers that the girl has been dead for some years during a boat trip to the Chiron lighthouse. Eben goes there on the anniversary of her death, but after seeing her one last time, he is rescued by fishermen while he himself is in danger of drowning. Suspended between melodrama and psychological thriller, Dieterle’s film, a ‘fragile ghost story’, was much loved by Luis Buñuel for its magical combination of fairytale and ‘amour fou’ and above all for its virtuoso figurative spells (various tonal shifts, final technicolor) which are reproduced in all their splendour in this version.