Jennifer Jones Centennial: Cluny Brown (1946)
Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 3:00PM For the Centennial of one of Oscar's largely forgotten superstars, we asked Team Experience to pick one of her films to watch.
by Paolo Kagaoan
We’ve done centennials here before but this one comes with some degrees of difficulty. It doesn’t help that someone changed her name from Phylis Lee Isley into the whitest name in the world, and that the person who gets more Google results for that name is a curler. As a Canadian I can’t say anything bad about curling, but shouldn't a Best Actress Academy Award winner be on at least equal standing to a Gold medallist? Look up all the women who have had five Oscar nominations and a win (Bancroft, Sarandon, Hepburn, Maclaine, etc...) and imagine the world forgetting them. Explaining Jones to friends is equally difficult, even to people in the film industry who know her second husband's name, David O. Selznick.
I’d only previously seen Jones in Beat the Devil, a terrible dengue fever dream of a film. And it’s on TV all time instead of films with better reputations like Portrait of Jennie, which is her highest rated film on both iMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. Or Cluny Brown, her film with the highest rating on Letterboxd, and one that also came out the same year as Duel in the Sun (the film that brough her her 4th conseuctive Best Actress nomination) so that's what I picked to watch...
Cluny Brown is the last film that Ernst Lubitsch completed. Convincing audiences that apple pie American actors had European sensibilities is still a subgenre today, but it’s one that Lubitsch perfected. Watching this alone feels like a cheat. It was a moderate box office success, making me wonder how it plays to audiences then and now. Its comedic rhythm and tone, which Jones helps bring to life, are so bizarrely different that I wonder if I’m going to be in a room full of people who get it. Or worse, if I’m going to be the only person laughing in the room and will stop because I’m the only person laughing. And that sense of feeling alone plays into the film’s content, which I’ll explain later.
Instead, I’ll explain the other really strange thing about this film: both of its leads are cast against type. Specifically, I'm talking Charles Boyer, the OG gas lighter, who is probably playing the happiest refugee in film history. He’s no Victor Laszlo. Also starring Peter Lawford, this is also a movie that shows Boyer as a fantasy for women. Sure he’s a bit older and is not Cluny’s type at all, but he’s a guy who understands the world for what it really is without being smug about it. And he’s a white foreigner – women are into that, right? I can be into that.
Charles Boyer in "Cluny Brown"
Casting against type also applies to Jones, who plays the titular role. In Beat the Devil, she’s the smartest person in every scene. Here, playing a female plumber turned maid, she successfully sells the trope of a woman who is smart but doesn't know it. The idea of someone who is oblivious to Britain’s class system is, again, bizarre. It’s also something that the working class characters around her care more about than the aristocracy. I’m not British, thankfully, but I perhaps wrongfully assumed that that country ingrains the idea of ‘knowing your place,’ which is something that some characters tell Cluny.
Cluny Brown, like many comedies, is a film about a society trying to destroy a woman’s soul. Like many class-conscious comedies, mistaken identity comes into play. Jones and Lubitsch expand on the idea to show that social mobility is an idea entrenching itself into Europe. Cluny can walk into a hotel or a manor and have tea and crumpets with the upper crust, savouring those moments before someone of her class points her out and drags her back down.
Again, as unbelievable as it is that a British woman doesn’t ‘know her place,’ we kind of don’t want her to. As an audience and as human, we don’t want to see the destruction of innocence, and neither do we want more people to learn that the world is a terrible place.
Cynics can nitpick her performance, starting from that accent. But the scene when Cluny finally ‘knows her place’ is Jones’ best, showing us a woman’s first heartbreak, reminding us of our own. And watching her here makes us root for her, to get out of that assigned place. May she end up with people who understand her and want her to be the better version of herself.
Reader Comments (15)
This is a bizarre item, for people who know and love films how is Jennifer Jones forgotten? And what is meant by " I’m not British, thankfully"
Joe -- i would argue that of all the actual superstars of the 1940s she is definitely more forgotten than anyone else of her stature. But yes, classic film fans know her.
I will be picking a Jones film i haven't seen. excited.
I've never warmed to her. She's not bad but in the three movies I've seen with her - Beat the Devil, Indescretion of an American Wife, and The Song of Bernadette (her winning role) she is always acting with a capital A, especially in contrast with the subtle intensity of someone like Montgomery Clift. I'll try out Cluny Brown and see if my impression of her changes.
4th consecutive nomination but not all of them were for Best Actress (her nod for "SInce You Went Away" in 1944 was in supporting).
REALLY looking forward to the team’s review of The Towering Inferno. What a fever dream of a movie.
She's do wonderful in Cluny Brown. Being directed by Ernst Lubitsch never hurt anyone. It really helps to have seen other Jennifer Jones films before seeing Beat the Devil. She's brilliant because she's playing so radically against type. I love her best in her two biggest "bad girl" roles. She's an absolute hoot heaving her tatas around in the delirious Duel in the Sun, featuring a hilarious Gregory Peck as (no kidding) "Lewt" and the two of them squirming around in their climactic Liebestod in the desert. There's no movie like it. The other great one is Ruby Gentry (famous for its theme song) where, as a gal from the wrong side of the tracks, pines for Charlton Heston and gets revenge against the snooty townsfolk who done her wrong. That said, I don't know about "forgotten" but it is certainly hard to visualize her when her name is mentioned. Not the way it is with Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, or other actresses of her stature from the 40s and 50s.
Omg can't wait for the write-up on DUEL IN THE SUN.
Joe - from a Canadian to a Brit I"d like to say....sorry.
Ken m. - I read the synopsis for Ruby Gentry and I was like "same." Too bad I couldn't find it legally or otherwise.
She's my absolute favorite. There's no actress remotely like her. She always leaves an impact.She has run the gamut--sinner, saint, you name it, she's done it, and with style and grace. The ultimate paradox. In The Towering Inferno, which is full of big movie stars and great actors, she is the one you remember. She's wonderful in Cluny Brown, and unfortunately, she didn't do enough comedies. But she's also charming and hilarious in Beat the Devil, and looking sensational in a blond wig.
Thank you for this series, can't wait!
I've tried with her, and over time have ended up seeing all her movies (even God help me Angel, Angel Down We Go! ARGH!), but I am decidedly not a fan.
Except for The Towering Inferno where I found her fine and likable she is usually terribly arch and mechanical. She made some fine films, mostly due to Selznick's influence, but I've never seen a performance of hers I didn't think could have been done better by a more talented actress.
This film is enjoyable because of Boyer and the Lubitsch touch.
Through the years I have seen most of her movies and have never found her at all very good.
I went to a Catholic school and must have seen The Song of Bernadette 50X
That may have been why? No.. she never moved me and found her boring.
I would recommend you
Passion fruit leaves tea
and avoid old movies
I think Portrait of Jennie and Song of Bernadette are the only movies of hers I've been able to get through. I hope to be convinced of her abilities, which I'm not so sure of at this point.
I think she is somewhat forgotten because she doesn't really have a rewatchable classic that everyone knows (not even Bernadette) and she didn't really have that TV late career resurgance that so many of her contemporaries had.
She's so delightful n charming in Cluny Brown!! It's a pity she nev do more comedies.
I'd rather she got nom for this than Duds in the Sun!
Imo, she was a rather limited actress n her over controlling, n over bearing 2nd husb Selznick muz hav burned too many bridges tt she was never offered any good roles after 1955.
This was the first movie I ever saw with Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, so it's a little weird to read them as being cast against type!
Now for the really strange part. I saw this in 1986 on French television (English with French subtitles), and the film I saw was slightly different from the one that can be found on the Internet.
In the version I saw, which remains memorable to this day, because it was one of the absolute best scenes in the movie, Cluny Brown has repaired the fussbudget's plumbing, been carted off by her uncle, and pressed into service. Uncle Arne has told her that she has to go and there's nothing she can do about it. Cluny Brown then leaves the apartment to take a walk. This is when Adam Belinski finds her sobbing on a park bench, about how Uncle Arne keeps telling her that she doesn't know her place. This leads to Belinski's postulate that some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels and some people like to feed squirrels to the nuts, "So who am I to say, 'Nuts to the squirrels'?"
It's such a key line to the movie, and the effect is so different depending on the context in which it's said. In the internet available version (found on youtube), the line is almost a throw-away. In the French-late-nite-tv version, it was an incredible act of kindness uttered by one out-of-place person to another.
Some day, I hope to find that version again!