Jennifer Jones Centennial: "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"

Reader Request: You voted on which Jennifer Jones films we had to write about for her centennial and this was your top choice. So it's your fault, then.

One of the tag lines reads...

In each other's arms they found a love that defied 5,000 years of tradition!

'Defying tradition? But what's more traditional than Hollywood casting white stars in Asian roles?' he said sarcastically. Figured we should get this out of the way upfront and then try to ignore it: Jennifer Jones's last Oscar nomination came for playing Han Suyin, a biracial doctor, who falls for Mark Elliott, an American foreign correspondent (William Holden) in Hong Kong...

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Jennifer Jones Centennial: "Indiscretions of an American Wife"

We're celebrating Jennifer Jones's centennial. By your request (you voted on which two movies we'd cover), here's Nathaniel R...

Your viewing assignment should you choose to accept it, and you really should, is Vittorio de Sica's Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953), a floridly emotional 65 minute drama (you read that right) in which a very thirsty Jennifer Jones engages in some illicit behavior because what else can you do when confronted with the beauty of Montgomery Clift in the 1950s?

Though 1953 was arguably Monty's peak (he also starred in Hitchcock's I Confess! and the Best Picture winner From Here to Eternity that year), this melodrama from the Italian master Vittorio de Sica is Jennifer Jones's film from fussy indecisive start to farewell heartbreak finish...

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Soundtracking: "Watchmen"

by Chris Feil

Ten years on and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is remembered as a overly loyal misfire. But originally our hopes were sky high for this adaptation, a long-awaited superhero take for adults sourced from one of the most lauded tomes in graphic novel history. Maybe when it arrives this year, Damon Lindelof’s incoming HBO “continuation” series can satisfy our passion for Alan Moore’s original creation - however unlikely it is that is satisfies Moore himself.

Perhaps the single thing that set the film up for failure was the very one that made us think Snyder had pulled off the impossible: it’s stunning teaser trailer set to The Smashing Pumpkins’ “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning”. It was one of the best teasers of an era when that still mattered, and we fans went crazy. But ultimately the song choice was writing checks musically that the film itself couldn’t cash...

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Jennifer Jones, the early years and 'years at the top'

HAPPY JENNIFER JONES CENTENNIAL!

 Paolo wasn't kidding when he said that the Centennial of Jennifer Jones (that's today!) would be a challenge. Though we usually have some buy-in for centennials literally no one else on Team TFE volunteered for this one so it'll be short. But I'll do one or two pictures. i'm annoyed that I can't do Duel in the Sun (1946), which I've never seen, but I can't find it to stream. Actually easy availability is how I came up with your choices. So vote and tell me which of these films you most want to discuss:

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But before we get there, and overview of her career.

And the eternal question: How long can any given star can stay at 'the top' from Old Hollywood to the right now...

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Jennifer Jones Centennial: Cluny Brown (1946)

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 Kagoaoan

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... 

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