Portrait of Jennie (1948)

Portrait of Jennie (1948) is a supernatural romantic drama artist-as-hero sepia black and white and at the same time technicolor David O. Selznick in the tradition of quality vehicle for Jennifer Jones magical and strange high-value and purified mystical love movie mad hard upon the crest of the film noir wave and so shares not a few virtues with that immortal form, the noir, the form by which it shall today be judged.

For it is a film not necessary of noir, but yet does look to the most over stylised elements of our favourite film language, in fantasy and in shadow.

Portrait of Jennie (1948) is expressive of the era too and of course of the faults of its producer the man who seeks more than anything to see the master plastering of his name across ab absent credit screen, a screen upon which no credit would ever roll, one of the most unusual choices in any of the canons with the canons within the canons of it all.

William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie (1948) is a phantasmagorical reverie rendered in shades of longing and loss. Rarely has a studio picture dared to be so unapologetically odd, so defiantly poetic. Emerging from the post-war American malaise, this ghostly meditation on love and time presumes to dramatize the ineffable.

It risks sentimentality, as all fantasies of love do, yet by virtue of its visual language and a certain obliquity of mood, it achieves something near rapture. It is a film untroubled by rational exposition and, paradoxically, enriched by its vagueness.

The story unfolds and unrolls like  magical black and white bedsheet of sparkling silver and black cloth, woven with frosty skyline patterns and New York's trad haze in the freeze. This is within Depression-era New York, a city here rendered not as metropolis but as mythic fog.

Eben Adams, a destitute painter with evident but dormant talent, wanders its snow-cloaked parks, waiting to be summoned by his muse. Joseph Cotten, typically cast as worldly or sardonic, here turns inward, his performance composed of glances and murmurs. The real-life grit of 1934—a time when Roosevelt's New Deal was still embryonic and hunger haunted the sidewalks—is abstracted into a terrain of reverie.

Adams meets Jennie, a girl whose speech betrays another era, whose clothes and mannerisms defy chronology. She seems to belong to the past, and with each encounter she grows older, more ethereal, until she emerges as a woman fully formed and utterly unattainable. Jennifer Jones plays this spectral muse with a kind of diffused glow, neither angelic nor corporeal. Her presence is not acted so much as conjured.

There is something disconcertingly sculptural in the way the film regards Jones. She is viewed not as character but as a pictorial ideal—a figure to be fixed in pigment and protected from time. Selznick, who produced the film and was Jones's husband, hovers over the proceedings like a Pygmalion lost in an aesthetic trance. Jones's earlier success in The Song of Bernadette marked her as a vessel of purity. Here, that reputation is warped into something more wistful: a beauty receding into the past even as she inspires the present.

The cinematography by Joseph H. August, completed shortly before his death, is among the most painterly in all of American cinema. The trickery of gauze filters and antique lenses invokes an aura of unreality, as if each frame were brushed onto canvas. In certain sequences, the image is tinged sepia or green; the final revelation of Jennie’s portrait bursts, shockingly, into Technicolor. These chromatic punctuations serve not as spectacle but as emotional exclamation.

The score, arranged by Dimitri Tiomkin from the music of Claude Debussy, adds an additional layer of melancholy. La fille aux cheveux de lin drifts through the film like Jennie herself: elusive, haunting, always departing. 

The choice of Debussy, a composer often associated with evanescence and half-light, is both obvious and precise. His harmonies, unresolved and wistful, echo the film’s refusal to be grounded in either time or certainty.

Cecil Kellaway and Ethel Barrymore in Portrait of Jennie (1948)

At one level, Portrait of Jennie is an artist’s parable, a testament to the impossibility of separating the artistic impulse from the romantic one. Adams cannot paint Jennie until he loves her, and he cannot keep her once she is rendered. The final painting, the titular portrait, is an act of preservation as much as creation. Its unveiling, framed like a museum exhibit, suggests that art alone can rescue love from the grave.

It would be facile to speak of the film as a feminist allegory in any conventional sense, but its treatment of Jennie invites scrutiny. She exists largely in the imagination of a man, and yet her progression from child to woman under her own mysterious temporal logic suggests an agency that transcends narrative control. 

Her dialogue, especially in the early scenes, is layered with resignation. She speaks as one who knows she will not be believed. Jones plays Jennie not as passive dream-girl but as someone burdened by foreknowledge, someone for whom femininity is both enchantment and exile.

Sheep in Central Park in Portrait of Jennie (1948)

The film's spiritual kin lies in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and, more distantly, Vertigo (1958), both of which trace male obsession with female figures who do not fully belong to the world. But Portrait of Jennie is more radical in its abstraction. It presumes that time itself is porous, that memory can be more vivid than presence. 

The year of its release, 1948, was a hinge between wartime discipline and postwar indulgence, a year of reconsolidation. Truman was elected president in a stunning upset; the Marshall Plan began to reshape Europe; and the House Un-American Activities Committee intensified its grip on Hollywood. Portrait of Jennie, with its repudiation of history's linearity, offered an escape into the non-rational, a realm where love was not subject to politics or death.

As a contribution to American cinema, the film's strangeness has rendered it both beloved and ignored. It fits uncomfortably into genre classifications. It is fantasy, but not fairy tale; romance, but devoid of resolution. Yet precisely in its refusal to conform lies its importance. In an era when the studio system was beginning to fracture, Portrait of Jennie revealed the possibilities of a different kind of storytelling—one shaped not by plot, but by mood; not by cause and effect, but by presence and absence.

The film's noir lineage, though not overt, is unmistakable. Like Laura (1944) or The Seventh Victim (1943), it concerns the pursuit of a woman who is more symbol than self, and like all noir, it is steeped in a mood of fatalistic yearning. 

Its play with shadows and chiaroscuro is not mere atmosphere; it is the visual corollary of doubt. Adams is not a detective but he is driven by the same compulsion: to find the woman who can redeem his broken life. The closer he gets, the less real she becomes. The supernatural angle heightens this sensibility. 

Jennie exists at the interstice of life and death, past and future, presence and absence. She is not so much a ghost as a memory given form. Like the femmes fatales of noir, she inspires and destroys. But unlike them, her danger is metaphysical.

The supernatural is not merely ornamental. It constitutes the film's grammar. Time behaves strangely. Reality seems porous. This is a world governed not by chronology but by recurrence. Jennie appears in cycles, always aging but never stable, as if emotion itself were warping the clock. Her inexplicable knowledge of bygone eras, her anachronistic mannerisms, her connection to events long since faded into archival dust—all point to a spectral realm at odds with ordinary logic. The lighthouse storm sequence, in its hallucinatory fury, completes the film’s journey from the tangible to the unreal.

Joseph Cotten, by 1948, had become a reliable interpreter of noir disillusionment. His work in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Third Man (1949), and Gaslight (1944) had established him as the thinking man’s antihero. Cotten always brought a weariness to his roles, a disillusioned intelligence. In Portrait of Jennie, he finds a different register: vulnerability. The hard shell of his usual roles dissolves, replaced by a desperate romanticism. There is no cynicism in Eben Adams, only yearning. Cotten’s restrained performance makes this believable.

Director William Dieterle, often remembered for his biopics of historical figures (The Life of Emile Zola, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, Juarez), brought a European sensibility to American cinema. A German émigré who began his career under the influence of German Expressionism, Dieterle had a painterly eye and a metaphysical inclination. 

He was perhaps uniquely suited to direct Portrait of Jennie. His earlier work in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) hinted at his ability to weave visual grandeur with psychological turmoil. Here, he pushes further, turning New York into a dreamscape. His direction is fluid, intuitive, almost improvisational. He allows scenes to linger beyond narrative necessity, privileging mood over momentum. In this, he shares more with Cocteau than with his American contemporaries.

Selznick formed Vanguard Films (1943–1951) to complete projects in progress at the time Selznick International Pictures was dissolved. Films were distributed by United Artists unless noted.

May 18, 1944 Reward Unlimited Short film distributed by the Office of War Information

July 20, 1944 Since You Went Away

December 1944 I'll Be Seeing You

December 28, 1945 Spellbound

December 31, 1946 Duel in the Sun  *

December 29, 1947  The Paradine Case *

June 4, 1948 Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House *

December 24, 1948 Portrait of Jennie *

There is a profound loneliness at the heart of Portrait of Jennie. Adams paints to stave off obscurity, and Jennie appears to offer him something beyond recognition: transcendence. But it is not sustainable. Their last meeting, during a climactic storm at sea, is overlaid with theatrical effects—green filters, back projections, tumultuous waves—that might seem absurd in a lesser film. Here, they operate as visual metaphor. The storm is not meteorological but existential.

If the ending is ambiguous, it is also strangely affirmative. The final image of Jennie’s portrait, static and framed, offers solace. She has been fixed in time, if only in oil and pigment. Adams survives, changed not by knowledge but by emotion. 

The painting hangs in a museum, watched by anonymous girls who may never know the story behind the face.

To watch Portrait of Jennie is to enter a temporal labyrinth. It refuses closure. It does not ask to be believed, only to be felt. In a cinema increasingly beholden to logic and exposition, it remains a miraculous anachronism: a poem filmed in black and white, with just enough color to remind us what it is to dream.

In Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie, Joseph Cotton plays a struggling artist who meets and falls in love with Jennie (Jennifer Jones), a young girl who, it evolves, has returned from the dead to find the lover to whom she was fated. The supernatural romance is enhanced by the elusiveness of Jennie’s comings and goings; each time she reenters Joseph Cotton’s world, she has aged disproportionately to the ‘‘real’’ time that has passed. When she reaches viable adulthood, she is reclaimed by death before the romance can be consummated, although not too soon for a portrait to be completed. Art is the progeny of the spiritual union. The film’s third reel, with itsmonochromatic tinting of black-and-white footage, enhances the sense that its events are occurring in another, other-worldly register. The final Technicolor insert of the (really rather prosaic) portrait being admired by romantic schoolgirls in the Metropolitan Museum of Art recalls the use of color insert in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The naturalism of these black-and white films is gravely undermined by the sudden shock of Technicolor, which enhances the supernatural properties of the portraits.

Portraiture in cinema has long captivated filmmakers, yet the 1940s witnessed a particularly heightened fascination with the morbidity inherent in painted images. Portraits, those spectral echoes invoked by Alberti, wherein the dead might seem "almost alive," gained profound narrative agency. Indeed, cinematic portraits embody an intrinsic reflection upon film's own mimetic relationship with mortality. Hollywood’s paradox—narratives constructed to deny death yet permeated by its inevitability—manifest vividly through portraits.

Roland Barthes's assertion in Camera Lucida—every photograph encapsulates a catastrophe already realized—accentuates cinema's fundamental tension: moving pictures both preserve and deny death. The portrait, stationary yet active within narrative cinema, foregrounds the uncanny morbidity implicit in all representation.

Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) introduces portraiture subtly yet powerfully. Here, the unnamed protagonist projects identification onto a portrait of Lady Caroline de Winter, inadvertently substituting her identity for the absent yet omnipresent Rebecca. Hitchcock's psychological mastery intensifies through this masquerade, underscoring identity's fragile negotiation between life and death. Similarly, in Suspicion (1941), the father’s portrait holds immense Oedipal gravity, literally falling under scrutiny, echoing the psychological weight of paternal authority.

The interplay between identity and representation intensifies in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). Detective McPherson's dream-like encounter beneath Laura's portrait suspends distinctions between representation and reality, resurrecting desire intertwined with death. 

Reynold Humphries rightly perceives this as a cinematic manifestation of the uncanny, much like Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944). Here, the entire narrative, hinged on Professor Wanley's fascination with a painted visage, unfolds explicitly as a dream, foregrounding mortality as an inevitable consequence of desire.

Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) further complicates portraiture’s pathological dimensions. Edward G. Robinson’s pitiful painter sees his "self-portrait as femme fatale," paradoxically dispossessed of authorship and identity. The film painfully literalizes portraiture’s role in embodying psychological disintegration and mortal jealousy, reaching peak morbidity.

Female portraiture in the "paranoid woman’s film" genre of the era, exemplified by Hitchcock’s Rebecca, George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), and Peter Godfrey’s The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), profoundly dramatizes the fusion of identity, femininity, and mortality. Mary Ann Doane argues convincingly for portraits as structuring devices within these narratives. Yet, notably, masculinity is equally vulnerable, as seen in Ronald Colman’s haunted thespian in Cukor’s A Double Life (1947), haunted by maternal portraiture.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls notably depicts Humphrey Bogart as a deranged painter whose portraits explicitly mark the passage of mortal decay. Contrary to abstraction, his paintings render death vivid, encapsulating Poe’s thematic legacy, famously articulated in "The Oval Portrait," wherein the subject’s life force is consumed by representation.

Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), adapting Wilde, further entwines portraiture, mortality, and supernaturalism. Ivan Albright’s grotesque rendering starkly visualizes internal moral decay. Parker Tyler's critique notwithstanding, the film’s explicit morbidity reveals cinema's ambivalence towards visual seduction and death’s inexorable pull.

Supernatural narratives like Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited (1944) similarly invoke portraits as sites of maternal anxiety and spectral conflict. The psychological complexity inherent in the film’s dual maternal portraits emphasizes portraiture’s psychoanalytic potency, a trope also humorously echoed in Charles Barton’s The Time of Their Lives (1946), where portraits physically move to comedic effect.

Yet, supernatural romance epitomized by Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948) crystallize the era’s morbidity in poignant forms. Portrait of Jennie explicitly marries supernatural love and art, dramatizing portraiture’s transcendental and melancholic potential. Jennie’s spectral evolution and ultimate portrait immortality, heightened by Technicolor, articulate cinema’s deeply intertwined obsessions with love, art, and death.

Mankiewicz’s subtler The Ghost and Mrs. Muir profoundly embodies portraiture’s poignancy. The film’s portrayal of a woman’s lifelong melancholia, inspired by the ghostly portrait of her lost love, eloquently dramatizes mortality's omnipresence. Portraiture, here reversed from muse to male inspiration, initiates and resolves narrative tension between life’s relentless mortality and art’s illusory permanence.

Oh yes this was a spectacle of great art appreciation, some child appreciation thanks to O. Selznick and appreciation of republican heroes like Michael Collins, and the indivisible link between Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary soldier and politician who was a leading figure in the early-20th century struggle for Irish independence, and free beer, as tagged up and presaged in the following garret leaping tag friendly lobby and newspaper messaging messages which read as funnily as follows for this fated film:

ARE YOU IN LOVE THIS WEEK? If you are - you'll get a double thrill from this most romantic of all love stories about a man who was in love with a girl who lived twenty years before his time. If you aren't - it may change your ideas on the subject for the rest of your life.

The screen's most romantic team

The morbidity embedded in these cinematic portraits illuminates not merely existential dread but also Hollywood's intermittent acknowledgment of mortality, a refusal of disavowal. The idea that Joseph Cotten and a child were going to be the screen's most enduring romantic team might have faded and melted away. 

Nancy Davis, Anne Francis, Ethel Barrymore and Nancy Olson in Portrait of Jennie (1948)

This was David O. Selznick's future soon to be wife and they were married in 1949 after a five years relationship, and a project made perhaps for her and a commercial failure at the same time, though they were not to know, the picture has today a huge amount of charm, and notably does feature location shooting in New York, which was unusual for 1948, unusual stuff.

As Thomas Elsaesser notes, portraits simultaneously invoke social, historical, economic, and sexual connotations, yet fundamentally embody existential anxiety—profound meditations on identity, sexuality, and death.

Portraiture’s morbidity in 1940s cinema thus reveals not merely thematic obsession but deeper structural fissures within Hollywood's narrative aspirations. Moving portraits stand as both literal and metaphorical disruptions, reflecting film’s troubled, self-conscious negotiation with representation and mortality. Far from static set pieces, these portraits actively complicate narrative coherence, inscribing death into cinematic form, and underscoring the profound existential tensions at the heart of classical Hollywood’s dreamlike illusions.

You die, and yet your doubles captured in the fragility of the celluloid survive you and continue to carry out your ephemeral actions.

Robert Desnos, translated in Williams, Figures of Desire 

Portrait of Jennie (1949)

Directed by William Dieterle

Genres - Drama, Fantasy, Mystery-Suspense, Romance  |   Sub-Genres - Ghost Film  |   Release Date - Apr 22, 1949  |   Run Time - 86 min.  |