Jennifer Jones: From DUEL IN THE SUN to THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

Jennifer Jones: THE SONG OF BERNADETTE

I still haven't watched Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (right, 1946), in which Jennifer Jones plays a perky housemaid with whom Charles Boyer falls in love, but I've watched Duel in the Sun about three times.

One of Hollywood's biggest blockbusters up to that time, the $5 million production Duel in the Sun (above) was Selznick's attempt to create another Gone with the Wind and to turn his beloved Jennifer into a superstar. Things, however, didn't quite work as planned. (In David Thomson’s Showman, screenwriter Ivan Moffat is quoted as saying that “David and Jennifer lived a life of considerable unreality, each giving the other the illusion of what they wanted themselves to be.”)

"[The character of] Pearl [Chavez] was a half-degenerate half-breed, dominated completely by her physical emotions, and Jennifer wasn't like that at all," director King Vidor would later say. "… It was a big struggle for her to play that. … She has a very expressive face and it signifies her thoughts, and in order to get her in the character of the girl, I had to tell her the story every day up to the point we were at in the script to get her in the mood."

A different directorial approach was probably needed. Yet, for Jones' hilariously sultry half-breed — her performance consists of assorted leers and sneers — the 27-year-old actress received her fourth consecutive Academy Award nomination (in addition to her win for The Song of Bernadette, she had also been nominated for Since You Went Away — in the supporting category — and for Love Letters). But at the box office she would never have the pull of, say, Betty Grable, Greer Garson, or Ingrid Bergman. As for the film itself, let's just say it's hardly thought of as one of the masterworks of the decade.

The chief problem with "the picture with a thousand memorable moments"(as per Selznick's publicity department) lies in the characterizations. Duel in the Sun features a heavily madeup Jones playing the wildcat Pearl, who, poor thing, is forced to repent by Walter Huston's cactus-chewing Sinkiller, is adopted by Lillian Gish's kind matriarch, is loved by the so-sedate-he's-almost-asleep hero Joseph Cotten, and is lusted after by a perennially smirking Gregory Peck, as Cotten's heelish (and more charismatic) brother.

The [London] Sunday Times critic Dilys Powell, for one, wrote: "Miss Jones, indeed, gives a performance beyond the range of any other young Hollywood actress I know. But … Duel in the Sun remains an enormous piece of dustbin." For reasons that had nothing to do with the film's aesthetic or artistic value, archbishop John J. Cantwell of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles concurred, stating that "Catholic people may not, with a free conscience, attend the motion picture Duel in the Sun … it appears to be morally offensive and spiritually depressing."

If only.

This overripe Western, shot in vainglorious Technicolor, is nothing more than an enjoyable Hollywood-made Mexican soap opera; in fact, it would have been even more enjoyable had its running time lost about 20 or so of its 129 minutes. And although the film doesn't quite deliver those promised "thousand memorable moments," its sun-drenched duel alone, after which a bleeding Pearl crawls in the dust to get near her dying lover, has deservedly earned Duel in the Sun a special place in film history.

Unfortunately, none of Jennifer Jones' films of the late 1940s and early 1950s were major box-office hits. Several, in fact, were both commercial and critical disappointments, among them John Huston's political thrill-less thriller We Were Strangers (1949), with John Garfield; Vincente Minnelli's sumptuous but dramatically stilted Madame Bovary (1949) at MGM; and Michael Powell's British-made Gone to Earth (1950, reshot and released as The Wild Heart in the US in 1952), which I've only seen in edited form. Her only popular vehicle in those days was Ruby Gentry (above, 1952), once again directed by King Vidor, and in which Jones is quite good as an outcast in a small Southern town.

But her best films (and performances) during that time were Portrait of Jennie, in which she once again worked with William Dieterle and Joseph Cotten, and Carrie, an intelligent adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel directed by William Wyler and co-starring Laurence Olivier.

One of Luis Buñuel's favorite films, Portrait of Jennie also happens to be my own favorite Jennifer Jones vehicle and performance — as the ghost who willingly faces death once again (!) all for love's sake. Jones, in fact, is extraordinary, delivering one of cinema's most potent displays of obsessive, unbridled passion.

Her films of the mid-1950s were a mixed batch.

There were two European-made box-office and critical disappointments: John Huston's Beat the Devil (right, 1954), a sort of Maltese Falcon send-up written by Huston and Truman Capote, and co-starring Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida, and in which Jones, wearing an unbecoming blond wig, plays a scatterbrained pathological liar; and Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), as the indiscreet wife of the title, having an affair with a miscast Montgomery Clift in one of Vittorio De Sica's weakest films of the period. (Pregnancy kept Jones away from The Country Girl, which was to earn Grace Kelly an Academy Award; also, a Broadway attempt, Portrait of a Lady, failed miserably and closed after only seven performances.)

Jones' by then dimming stardom underwent a major renaissance in 1955 with the release of the sudsy Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, directed by Henry King, in Technicolor, with gorgeous Hong Kong locations, William Holden as her leading man, and a theme song that plays in office elevators to this very day. The strange thing about Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is that it has all the elements of your typically cheesy Hollywood melodrama, but somehow it remains peculiarly affecting. (Filmmaker Terence Davies is another of the film's admirers.) As far as I'm concerned, the chief reason for its lasting effectiveness is Jones' flawless performance as the Eurasian Hong Kong doctor who falls madly in love with the wrong guy. I mean, not only he's white and married, he doesn't even have all that long to live. (It should be noted that Jones tended to be quite unlucky with her choice of men on screen.)

She's fine in the so-so Good Morning Miss Dove (1956), as a teacher who became a cold-hearted curmudgeon because of romantic heartbreaks in her past (told in flashback), and is equally fine in another big hit, the self-important The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), starring Gregory Peck in the title role and Marisa Pavan as The Other Woman — with Child to boot (during World War II, while Peck's character was away and feeling lonely and horny, and all that).

What bothers me most about the workmanlike The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is that if the situations had been reversed and Jones' dutiful, forgiving wife had had an affair and become the mother of another man's child during her lonely WWII years, I doubt it that writer-director Nunnally Johnson (who adapted Sloan Wilson's novel) would have depicted her character in as sympathetic a light as the one shining on Peck's I-only-want-to-do-what's-right-even-if-I-fail husband. In any case, Jones does what she can with her underwritten role, as the film's focus is mostly on Peck.