Portrait of Jenny

William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jenny (1948) is a curiosity, an atmospheric ghost story that is primarily interesting as rough draft for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The similarities between the two films are so numerous and intense as to require the conclusion that Hitchcock was heavily influenced by this picture when he made his (much better) movie. Like Vertigo, Portrait of Jenny involves a rather passive loner, Joseph Cotten in the part that Jimmy Stewart played in the Hitchcock movie, who has the misfortune to fall in love with a dead woman. The dead woman, exactly as in Vertigo, is obsessed by a place, the location where she died – in Jenny, this is a remote lighthouse at Land’s End on Cape Cod. Both films feature convents with spooky nuns, a tower with vertiginous spiral stairs, and a lush romantic soundtrack – Jenny’s soundtrack is by Dmitri Tiomkin, a series of variations on themes by Claude Debussy. In each film, an eerily beautiful young woman lures a man to his death. Both films involve destructive romantic obsession, portrait-painting, and Hitchcock’s signature composer, Bernard Herrman makes a cameo appearance in Jenny conducting a symphony orchestra. The film was produced by David Selznick and has some of the overblown, pseudo-artistic imagery that appears in other Selznick Hitchcock productions, most notably Spellbound, which features a Tiomkin score, and Rebecca. Most importantly, both Vertigo and Portrait of Jenny feature location footage that situates the protagonist in a familiar landscape that morphs into unheimlich strangeness – Hitchcock’s film exploits San Francisco and the northern California coastline for its atmosphere, Portrait of Jenny uses Central Park with dark, shadowy skyscrapers overhead for its effects. Parts of Jenny were shot at the Cloisters on north Manhattan and Lillian Gish appears briefly as a white nun. Dieterle’s film is cloying and a bit creepy. Jennifer Jones as the dead girl first appears as a child, although she is obviously a woman wearing a girl’s togs, and says that she “will hurry to grow up” to be with Cotton’s lonely painter, with whom she has inexplicably fallen in love. (The film suggests that she is Cotton’s muse). At a time when Jackson Pollock and other painters were about to erupt on a New York art scene heavily influenced by European surrealism and cubism, Cotton’s portraits are alarmingly kitschy and retrograde – they look like the kind of stuff you could buy for your rec room at Shopko. The film is made in velvety black and white. But, at its storm-tossed climax, the movie switches to a deep saturated green tint – the images are tempestuous Winslow Homer seascapes dyed a dense acid green. The post-storm sequences are sepia-toned and, in the final shot, we see the titular portrait of Jenny in color, an effect also utilized in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1945), another peculiar film with artistic pretensions directed by Albert Lewin. This is an unusual and interesting film. Dieterle was a yeoman director who cut his teeth in the German expressionist era at UFA and his use of the camera shows his roots in Teutonic romanticism – his most well-known pictures are The Devil and Daniel Webster, another atmospheric fantasy film, and a prestigious series of biography pictures, including Juarez and The Story of Louis Pasteur.