Very best movie i ever watch

Good movie but grossly overrated

A Masterpiece!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a great fantasy story. An aspiring artist who is lacking inspiration meets a pretty young woman in a park. They seem to hit it off. Later, from memory, he paints a portrait of her. He sees this as a kind of masterwork. From that point on, he has several encounters with her. It seems she is getting older, faster, and becoming more and more sophisticated. He also seems to be losing connection with her. This is a loving movie about unrequited love, facing obstacles one cannot overcome. It's also a mystery of the first order. This is a film of consummate beauty and ethereal being. We have to ask ourselves who this woman is and where did she come from.

Sometimes one happens upon a film which one wouldn't have even known about unless it is found by accident. This, for me, is one of those films and I couldn't be happier to have found it. Having done a little research on the actor Joseph Cotten, he is on the record as stating that this is the favourite of all the films he starred in. With some choice actors in support in the form of Jennifer Jones, Ethel Barrymore - of the famous Barrymore acting clan - Lilian Gish and Cecil Kellaway, everyone plays their parts beautifully. As for Cotten, he has never been in finer form, as his usual melancholy charm is perfectly suited to this film. In essence, the plot revolves around a struggling artist who is yet to find his niche and, indeed, his muse. That muse turns up in the form of Jennie, played beautifully by Jennifer Jones. This film is notable for the fact that it is mostly in monochrome i.e. black and white, but the final reel uses a green tint and sepia. In terms of the direction, it is wonderful and some effective but subtle special effects - for which it bagged an Oscar - are put to very good use. Probably one of the greatest ever love stories committed to film and I'm so glad to have seen it.

This film captivated me when I first saw it on television over 40 years ago. I later learned that it had received a pasting from the critics when it was first released. After many viewings, I can see its faults, but it still has that sense of timelessness and otherworldliness that caught my imagination all those years ago.Eben Adams, a struggling artist played by Joseph Cotton arrives at a gallery run by Mr Matthews and Miss Spinney, played by two of Hollywood's most brilliant scene-stealers, Cecil Kellaway and Ethel Barrymore. Eben's lack of inspiration is revealed when he shows Miss Spinney some of his painting, but her belief in him encourages him to go on.Eben meets a strange young girl called Jennie in Central Park. They meet a number of times and each time she is several years older although only a week or so has elapsed. He realises that she comes from another time. Eben does some detective work and tracks down a number of people who help fill in the missing pieces so that when Jennie reappears, he understands the events she seems to be reliving. Jennie becomes Eben's ghostly muse and inspires him to paint her portrait. However tragedy awaits.The movie is nearly overbalanced by some over-the-top acting from David Wayne as Eben's cab driver friend, and the Irish patrons at a pub – it's a relief when they leave the screen. On the other hand, Joseph Cotton seems too dependable and too balanced – it is a stretch to accept his single-minded pursuit of art despite rejection at every turn. At 43, he was also too old for the part.Jennifer Jones at 29 faced the same problem, especially as she was required to age from twelve to late teens during the course of the film. But Jennifer Jones had an ethereal quality anyway – age aside, this film was perfect for her.Robert Brackman, an accomplished portrait painter, produced the finished painting and a beautiful pastel study that appears briefly after Eben first meets Jennie. Jennifer Jones sat a number of times for the painting and sketches. The scenes of Jennie and Eben in the studio are the best in the film; it is here that the movie is at its most romantic and haunting.The reverence paid to art and portraiture is probably the biggest element of fantasy in the film. The portrait ends up in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art revered by all who see it. Today, a neatly rendered, representational work such as this would be a hard sell as great art, especially with the influence of all the 'isms over the last 100 years or so. However, the film makes you believe in its power.The final meeting between Eben and Jennie on a rocky headland in a storm is pretty mad. David O Selznick wanted to film the sequence in a real storm but had to settle for studio effects and miniatures. Never one to leave well enough alone, he urged the use of coloured filters in the last 10 minutes of the film – it didn't need them.It's easy to see the miscalculations in "Portrait of Jennie" but the film sustains a brilliant mood throughout with atmosphere to spare. "Portrait of Jennie" is a film you don't forget – there is nothing quite like it in the history of the cinema.

'Portrait of Jennie' lays its cards on the table from the outset, explicitly telling us against a background of swirling clouds (you know the sort of thing) how the movie is going to deal with cosmic spiritual issues. So you can't say you haven't been warned that you're in for Hollywood hokum at its hooiest.Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is a struggling painter who meets a turn-of-the-19th-century ghost in Central Park, NY, whose love inspires him to become the great painter he feels he is destined to be. Over the course of the film, Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones) convincingly ages from young girl to convent-school alumnus, and the (somewhat cheesy) portrait that Adams paints of her is acclaimed as a work of genius.In the end, Adams doggedly follows Jennie to Land's End lighthouse on the brink of a tidal wave, where she is washed away except that her love survives, etc. etc. This kind of spoils the story - it would have been better if Adams himself had died, and the portrait had been his one-off work of genius, no-one knowing why he decided to take a dinghy out in a sea storm. No mention is made of how he survived on $25 for six months, but it doesn't matter.But the film pulls out all the stops, uncompromisingly sticking to its premise, and in spite of its pretensions you have to acknowledge its consistency in being a complete fantasy in the same way as a contemporary Disney feature. Film noir it ain't, but Ethel Barrymore does a good turn as a self-confessed old maid who takes the somewhat mature Joseph Cotten under her wing. Later in the film we get a few Technicolor switches which add nothing, but must have been the equivalent of state-of-the-art CGI at the time. Modern CGI users, take note.'Portrait of Jennie' is ridiculous and sentimental, but completely divorced from reality in the same way as today's 'Knowing', or 'Midnight in Paris'. On that level, it works. Eben Adams should have died, though, because the hero has to make the biggest sacrifice. He'd already lost contact with Jennie, so her 'death' had no resonance. His death would have been the price of his achieving great art. As it is he gets off lightly.