Jennifer Jones as a mixed-race girl in ‘Duel in the Sun’ (1947)

ONE BY ONE, the passing of all the great Hollywood stars who began their careers in the 1940s — the decade that remains the most social and self-critical in the American Film Industry — should leave us with many thoughts about the relationship of the absence of those stars and the quantity of brilliant and exemplary films they made, to the decay or indifference to civilized human values in societies across the world today.

Most of the 25 films of Jennifer Jones, for example, who just passed on at age 90, having stopped acting over 30 years ago, comprise profound lessons in the molding of an individual’s human sensitivity, emotional affection, the struggle between passion and reason, unconventional or innovative strength, and a balanced sense of right and wrong. Her films, like those of her greatest peers, such as Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Donna Reed, explored and created a reservoir of potential self-guidance, projecting experience in the unfolding of cause and effect.

Can we, should we, judge or label these films simply from the hindsight of an already evolved world which has left behind the specific circumstances, situations, even sentiments of those decades just over half a century ago, when the best films of these stars were made?

Are these really only relative time-related human and social values of this past era of Hollywood film production, to which brilliant stars like Jennifer Jones belonged?

Stoic mystique

Looking at the majority of screen roles Jennifer Jones left us, we are capable of seeing how she transcended various period situations and stereotypes which existed in the Hollywood Film Industry sixty years ago, and continues today in their own new way. It was with her third film, ‘The Song Of Bernadette’, made by 20th Century Fox in 1943, that Jennifer connected with that powerful personal feature of a stoic mystique in her role as the peasant girl, who apparently witnessed a vision of Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary, at Lourdes, France, in the early 20th Century.

She would keep that mystique, which goes far beyond the simple quality of her gender, and transform it into various everyday roles that were by no means sheepishly religious, prissy, or socially conventional, but boldly individualistic, extremely sensitive and caring, and especially full of simmering female sensuality.

Her fourth film, ‘Since You Went Away’ of 1944, is the one in which perennial human values of stoic perseverance, moral individualism and social altruism are stunningly conveyed by a young Jennifer Jones in a cool and unexaggerated realism that established those trademark gifts she brought to her various theme-roles of the woman who evolves personally, and clarifies benevolent social values as she passes through her films.

The beautiful stylistic structure and narrative content of ‘Since You Went Away’ are, however, cinematic qualities which go far beyond the vital roles of Claudette Colbert and Jennifer Jones as the mother/daughter team, and defines this film as one of countless other examples which prove the 1940s to be not only the most memorable moral era of Hollywood productions, but also an original expression of the supposedly great humanitarian American practical values of innovative individualism, social solidarity, and benevolence offered to the world via the cinematic medium.

‘Since You Went Away’ enjoyed enormous popularity and success in 1944, and during that decade after America had entered the 2nd World War, because the film both reflected and influenced life in American families where husbands, fathers, and adult sons had been sent into combat and service abroad, leaving uncertainty and anxiety in households now managed and guided by females alone, in a social environment where cutbacks on food and other items were routine; where economic conditions were stringent; where private homes became partly rented out; and a collective social conscience and volunteerism became nurtured everyday values.

Upbeat and different

What, of course, endears this film to us is how Colbert and her two daughters, Jones and Shirley Temple, their coloured housekeeper, Hattie McDaniel, Colbert’s male substitute acquaintances, Joseph Cotton, and a senior tenant, struggle through this crisis assisting each-other.

So, what happens to such a film after the 2nd World War has ended, and the general feeling of crisis passes, and social and economic circumstances improve?

Naturally, the American public switched its attention to other films, upbeat and different films, endlessly rolling out the Hollywood film studios which did not reflect or hark back to a social period that had been challenging.

But such a reaction is itself relative, and has nothing at all to do with the intrinsic, and no doubt cyclical social value of a Hollywood classic like ‘Since You Went Away’, as well as hundreds of other similar films of its decade.

This film should not be defined or evaluated only by that era of Hollywood films made to ease the negative effects of the 2nd World War on the American family front; or be seen only within a North American context.

And this is where even some of the best American cinematic critical minds have erred in their limited nationalistic evaluations of this impressive film, in the same way that many American film critics or commentators had failed to see the extra-realistic universal social insights of the American Film Noir style, which some French critics first identified.

It seems to totally miss parochial American criticism that classic Hollywood films –which made an enormous amount of money for the American economy from their export to foreign nations before and after the 2nd World War — also possess social, individual and collective civilized values perpetually relevant to those foreign societies.

A perfect example is the case of British Guiana, where, prior to its Independence in 1966, and a good half a dozen years after, prints of ‘Since You Went Away’ circulated in weekly rerun cinema programmes, influencing and contributing to a marked higher standard and quality of daily civilian behaviour in the society back then, whereas today, with the nonsensical destruction of local cinemas, poor TV entertainment programming, and total privatization of movie consumption, the absence of such films for collective public viewing is unable to administer its relevance to similar circumstances this film explores which exist outside a North American war-time context as a serious defect in a Guyanese national reality of fatherless homes, uneducated and misguided attitudes, and callous behaviour spreading crudity and hasty violent reactions as a much too common social reality encountered today.

Moral liberalism

Jennifer Jones, like many of the greatest classic Hollywood stars, was a product of the most exciting and socially educational decade of Hollywood film-making, the 1940s, under the Franklin D Roosevelt government which permitted and promoted moral liberalism in artistic professions spanning cinema, TV, the plastic arts and creative writing.

By 1949, it was not surprising to see Jennifer Jones appearing in a shocking liberal –leftist and ant-fascist Hollywood films like ‘We Were Strangers’, in which she acted feverishly as a sensitive defiant Cuban girl sympathizing with radical activists, played by John Garfield and Gilbert Roland in a pre-Castro corrupt Cuba.

No doubt this was one of the films which caused Garfield and director, John Huston, both American film artists of the highest quality, to be persecuted by the 1950s witch-hunt against social liberalism in Hollywood.

Jennifer’s contribution to justice and civilised social behaviour via her screen roles, however, cannot be pinned down to any specific ideal social formula or programme, since it goes to the root of human imperfection, which involves the weakness and egotistic delusions of the human mind.

This is evident in one of her most moving and touching roles, as the girl traumatised by an abusive marital incident which created a loss of her memory, in the unforgettable Hollywood classic, ‘Love Letters’ of 1945.

By 1947, she had made ‘Duel In The Sun’, a film that shocked as it immortalized her, one of the greatest adult Westerns ever made, and one of the most brilliantly colourful and expensive to make, which gave her the first chance to interpret what would be one of her most memorable theme-roles, that of the often abused, stereotyped and stigmatised person of mixed race.

‘Love Is A Many Splendored Thing’ of 1955, a film beloved by most who saw it, also allowed her to interpret another anti-racist cross-cultural theme by her role as the Eurasian girl (and actual later writer, Han Huyin) in an affair with an American war correspondent, played by William Holden.

Charismatic values

At this point, I must become personal in order to reveal further charismatic values conveyed by this great actress’s abilities.

The first film I saw with Jennifer Jones was ‘A Farewell To Arms’ of 1958. I was not yet a teenager, but I fell in love with that image of a woman she portrayed in this film. When Jones, as the wise sensitive wartime nurse, decides to meet wounded patient, Rock Hudson (don’t laugh!) against the rules of the hospital matron, her excited appearance, locking the door to his ward room, sends romantic ripples through all romantics who recognise the high quality of such expressions of romance.

Added to this is Jennifer’s ability to flow smoothly between the veto of inhibitions and the release of just the right amount of licentiousness to keep her patient on the road to emotional and physical recovery.

This is the subtle sub-text she interprets for us in ‘A Farewell To Arms’, and steals the film. I could spot the influence of Jennifer Jones roles on many older Guyanese girls I knew during the hectic cinema-going era of British Guiana, and they were all delightful, liberal persons.

When she saddles up angrily and goes after Gregory Peck at the end of ‘Duel In The Sun’, it is not a personal intimate revenge due to his abuse and spurning of her; in fact, she still loves him deep within her passionate instinctual self. No! She goes after him because of his social barbarism; his continued dismissal of loyalty to the difference between right and wrong.

Now of course the screenwriter and director, King Vidor, could have intended this interpretation, but only Jennifer Jones had the ability to act it out without verbal explanation or dialogue, by the firm decisive way in which she grabs a horse and without hesitation mounts up and goes after Peck.

She transcends the idea of the female fooled simply because she is a vulnerable woman; her portrayals of being deceived are based on something deeper, more universal and detached, beyond simple female gullibility.

This is what makes her now forgotten portrayal of ‘Madame Bovary’ in 1949 a more mature and ambiguous interpretation than French actress Isabelle Huppert’s role in a later version.

Clearly an avid reader of high-quality literature, Jennifer Jones brought something of her own to filmed novels of Flaubert, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sloan Wilson — her unforgettable portrayal of Peck’s deceived but supportive wife in that masterpiece Hollywood film, ‘The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit’ — and her last great film, ‘Tender Is The Night’, guarantees the importance of Jennifer Jones, who demonstrated that the creative worth of an actor or actress lies not in what the film script offers or instructs them to do, but in how they take possession of the scene and enhance it with their own interpretive acting.

Such daring creative skill only succeeds in the hands of genuinely creative film stars like Jennifer Jones, whose legacy will live on in other genuinely receptive film stars and film fans who respect her wonderful contributions to making a better world via art.