Pictures and Motion Pictures in the 1940s

In the final scene of Portrait of Jennie (1948), three teenage girls are shown visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dressed and hatted in the style museum-visiting called for in the1940s, decorously excited, they look up at a beautiful young woman painted by the artist Eben Adams. One of the girls wonders if she was real. “What does it matter,” another smartly counters, “she was real to him or she wouldn’t look so alive.” The film has mostly been in black-and-white, later in a sepia tint bestowing a somber dignity on the museum and its pictures, but now it cuts to a Technicolor close-up of the portrait. The camera tracks in on Jennie’s old-fashioned frilled white blouse, blue sash, beribboned hairdo, and musing expression, all caught in a painted glow from above that looks very much like a Hollywood top-light. Accompanied by the raptures of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, Jennie’s girlish voice, as decorously excited as those of her observers, comes on to the soundtrack and closes the picture: “Oh Eben, is it really of me? . . . I think someday it will hang in a museum . . .”

A film historian might begin work on this scene by noting that it demonstrates the producer’s—David O. Selznick’s—ability to pick talent. The actresses taking the teenagers’ roles, Nancy Olson, Anne Francis, and Nancy Davis, would all go on to considerable careers in Hollywood, and in Davis’s case, after she married Ronald Reagan, to a career in the White House. The scene also testifies to Selznick’s adoration of Jennifer Jones, the star of the film, whom he would marry in 1949 after being divorced from Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene. It is Jennifer Jones’s face, painted in actuality by a journeyman portraitist named Robert Brackman, which we see on canvas at the end of the film, and the final Technicolor shot of it is like a bouquet handed to the star, an expression of Selznick’s romantic, sexual, and professional involvement with her. But the gesture is not merely a private one, the object of adoration not merely Jennifer Jones. What the scene really conveys is an adoring view of high culture, painting in particular, and painting is something many other mid-century films besides Portrait of Jennie make a fuss about. Selznick’s girls gazing up at the portrait (literally gazing up; they are photographed by a high-angle camera) might be paralleled by the police detective admiring, then falling in love with, the en décolleté beauty portrayed in the painting at the center of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944); or the pretend Madeleine Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), sitting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor before the full-length painting of the beautiful and doomed Carlotta, apparently assimilating herself to Carlotta’s fate; or the young widow in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), turning fascinated eyes on the portrait of the ship’s captain hanging on the wall of her new cottage; or all of the characters of Michael Curtiz’s The Unsuspected (1947), gazing worshipfully upwards at a portrait of a rich young heiress they think drowned at sea. All these canvas-besotted characters might be taken as stand-ins for the Hollywood filmmakers who, convinced of the cultural importance of painting, commanded by its power to command, were eager to showcase it in their works and, by it, to elevate and enthrall audiences.

This was not a purely American phenomenon. In the decade or so after World War II, the European cinema was repeatedly drawn to painterly subjects, as shown in a spate of documentary biopics about artists by Luciano Emmer, Enrico Gras, Henri Storck, Alain Resnais, and Gabriel Pommerand. Some of these films had success in the United States; Resnais’s Van Gogh won a 1949 Academy Award for best short subject. In England, Terence Fisher directed Portrait from Life (1948), wherein an army officer becomes fascinated by the portrait of a Displaced Person hung in a Piccadilly art exhibition, while...