The first of these 1939 B-movie productions was New Frontier, a John Wayne western made shortly after his star-making appearance in Stagecoach earlier that same year. New Frontier (or Frontier Horizon, where this secondary title comes from is anyone's guess) was a mid-entry in the Three Mesquiteers' massive 51 film franchise. Wayne made eight films in that franchise, and this one would end up being his last appearance. Why am I talking so much about Wayne in a post dedicated to Jones you ask? Simple, Jones is barely a presence here appearing in only a handful of scenes as the granddaughter of a major supporting player. She reads her lines, hits her marks, and generally keeps from embarrassing herself in this thin and dull oater.
Dick Tracy's G-Men was the third Republic serial starring the titular detective, as played with joyous, strong-jawed charm here by Ralph Byrd. Jones plays Gwen Andrews, Dick Tracy's secretary. Actually, "plays" makes it sound like she actually has anything to play, and she doesn't. She appears randomly to say a line or two about where Tracy can go for information, do menial office tasks, and she's frequently shot from behind her expansive curls. No wonder she ran away from Hollywood and off to New York shortly after completing both of these projects.
It was in New York that she auditioned for David O. Selznick's office. She fled in tears thinking she had bombed the audition, but Selznick overheard her and was impressed. He quickly signed her to a seven-year contract, and promptly went about the business of grooming her for stardom. He changed her name, scrubbed the first two projects from her resume and any future publicity, and all of that hard work eventually paid off. In 1943, she auditioned for Henry King's adaptation of The Song of Bernadette and won the coveted role.
The Song of Bernadette is not a great movie, but Jones is great in it. Her greatness is in how quiet and interior she is in a movie that is prone to meandering, heavily sentimental, and contains the general sense of a proselytized screed. Jones plays her Saint Bernadette as a real girl and refuses to embalm her before her time. She's consistently girlish, gentle, and completely guileless, but there's also a tough core of unshakable faith and belief in what she is seeing and experiencing. There are several moments where Jones goes even deeper, and two of these moments really linger in my mind.
First, there is a scene where a village boy tells her goodbye, and in this goodbye Bernadette realizes that he has always loved her. For one brief moment, Bernadette imagines the happy life with him she could have led, and watches it immediately dissolve before her eyes. All Jones does is smile sadly, look down, and tell him goodbye while handing him a flower. It's so simple but so deeply effective.
Equally as good is Bernadette's death scene. Any other actress would have raged against the dying of the light, but not Jones. Her final words are delivered with a whisper and an emotional piety that is a little unnerving for how unshakable this girl is. Jones digs deep into her request for prayers, and she quakes with vulnerability and acceptance of death. It's just a damn shame that the soundtrack has to swell with a heavenly choir and bombastic strings as this choice creates an emotional dissonance between the truth of what Jones is selling and the melisma of the soundtrack.
Frankly, I knew about fifteen minutes into The Song of Bernadette that I too would have voted for Jones if I were an Academy member in 1943, and her refusal to go big and broad in moments that lend themselves to that choice so easily only underscored it for me. For her great performance and near Herculean effort to keep the film from folding in on itself, Jones walked away with the Best Actress Oscar on her 25th birthday. Her Oscar win in 1944 marked the first of four consecutive nominations for Jones, and placed her in a small company of actresses (Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn included) who seemingly got nominated for showing up throughout the 1940s.
Since You Went Away is Selznick contribution to the wartime morale boost cinema, and it is a confused, punishingly long mess of a movie. There's plenty of good things here, but at nearly three hours (including an overture, intermission, and entrance music) it overstays its welcome and meanders too far and wide. One of the greatest strengths of the film is a series of performances, with Claudette Colbert's being the best.
Jones' performance is too big and broad in her earlier girlish moments, but her romance with Robert Walker in the film is the film's main source of tension and awkwardness. Walker and Jones were separating during filming and Jones manages to hide this fact from her work while Walker emphatically does not. Two scenes in particular standout for the behind-the-scenes friction bleeding into their work.
One scene features Walker and a green Guy Madison (achingly beautiful here) fighting in a bowling alley, and Walker's anger feels out of place in such a sentimental tear-jerker. His passive-aggressive anger boils slowly and its far too easy to read his personal anguish at Selznick seeping out while Jones wails for peace in the background. Even better, for both parties, is their infamous farewell scene at the train station. Jones finally stops keeping the personal demons at bay and embraces them as there's an intensity to their goodbyes here that goes beyond the confines of the characters and scene. Her screams of "I love you darling" are both impassioned and disquieting. This feels like the emotional apex of Since You Went Away, but then the film just keeps going. This provided Jones with her sole Supporting Actress nomination, just a year after winning her Oscar.
Love Letters is a completely preposterous piece of Gothic romance that I enjoyed probably far more than I should. It's a film that feels indispensable from its era, as the studio system churned out these kind of insane, heightened romantic melodramas with a frequency and skill-level that makes them impossible to repeat or separate from the time. I can't say that Love Letters is a good movie, but it is a gloriously strange one.
Joseph Cotten and Jones reunite a year after Since You Went Away, and once more they're cast as potential romantic partners for each other. While their romance was entirely one-sided on Jones' part in the prior film, Love Letters positions them as a one-true-pairing in this "love conquers all" weepie. It's a variation of Cyrano de Bergerac with added elements of murder mystery, amnesia, and expressionistic lighting. Not to mention that the Chris Massie novel this film was based on was adapted by Ayn Rand, of all people! To call the film bonkers is accurate, but it also coasts along as a narcotic brew of high-romance and gloomy secrets.
Another year, another Oscar nomination for Jones, and I'm not entirely sure she deserved either this one (or the prior one), but I found her work uniformly stronger here. It is here that Jones comes the closest to adopting a movie star-like screen image as a fey, ethereal girl, and she plays her part with an intensity that never quite finds an outlet. Her climatic flashback that untwists the knot at the center of the film is a high-point as Jones' intensity and emotional break from reality feel inherently truthful to the moment and character. Yet a certain uncontrollable tic or odd acting choice first appears here, it's hard to say which it actually is, and that is the way that Jones' mouth appears to work independently from the rest of her facial muscles. This is a noticeable thing that will stay with Jones for the remainder of her screen career.
Love Letters refuses to remain tethered to reality, and it's charming for its commitment to its ridiculous plot and character transitions. Maybe she did deserve that Oscar nomination after all for finding a truth in the material and making it all work. Lord knows, that had to take a lot of effort on her part, and Cotten's as I don't mean to diminish his equally necessary work here.
1946 would be a banner year for the actress. She appeared in two films that year, and the two of them demonstrate the full extent of her range. After playing a saint and two variations of girls-next-door in love, Jones got to play comedy for Ernst Lubitsch in Cluny Brown and a mixed-race harlot in Duel in the Sun. These are two of her greatest films, one of which she is widely remembered for and the other something of an underappreciated gem.
Cluny Brown came out first and was the final completed film by Ernst Lubitsch. It's not one of his greatest films, but it's immensely pleasurable and absurd, frequently so pleasurable because it's so damn absurd, tale of class snobbishness, a political refugee, and a tomboy with a talent and love for plumbing. It all sounds deeply strange, but Cluny Brown is a thorough delight of zesty wit and sophisticated satire.
Jones' essay of Cluny has to be one of the definitive highlights of the actress' career up to this point, and probably for the entirety of it. She's positively eccentric and lovely, and has finally found an outlet for her emotional intensity that threatened to topple several moments in Since You Went Away and Love Letters. She makes Cluny a woman that's impossible to pin-down into neat, conventional social mores and roles, and delivers a howler of a double-entendre involving banging on pipes. There's also a clear sense of joy in how free Jones must feel in the role, and her self-conscious artifice is long gone. Jones feels like a natural for Lubitsch's world and work, and it is a moment where the star and director operate in blissful synchronicity.
There are two scenes in particular where Jones' uniformly strong performance rises into the stratosphere. The first is her introductory scene and the other is a scene where she's introduced to family she'll soon be working for. The first scene find Charles Boyer's Czech refugee dropping in on an apartment sublet by Reginald Gardiner's fuddy-duddy. Boyer is mistaken for the plumber (only in a Lubitsch comedy), and Jones eventually arrives proclaiming she's the actual plumber. Well, she's not, she's the plumber's orphaned niece, but she knows the trade and fixes the sink. Eventually, the three of them end up getting drunk.
Watching Jones play drunk is a great deal of fun as she's loose and uninhibited here, completely flowering under Lubitsch's guiding hand from the first moment. The camera loving drinks her in as she sways, slurs, and generally demonstrates her inability to conform to social graces and cues. Gardiner is appalled by Jones' tom-boyishness while Boyer is immediately enthralled with this oddball.
Even better is the scene where she's mistaken for a high-society friend of the Carmels and the slow realization that she's actually their new chambermaid. She's afford tea, sandwiches, and all of the good graces that the societal station would allow her, and they're slowly stripped away as the oxygen in the room goes out. In the end, Jones is left alone in the room holding the teacup, sad but unbroken. That's all she outwardly does, but her body language and emotional interior register as so much more.
While the central romance in Cluny Brown is not of the dynamic sexual sparks of James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan in The Shop Around the Corner, or the clash of personalities of Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka, it's still deeply pleasing. Boyer and Jones are a meeting of kindred spirits, each of them seemingly incapable of fitting in with wider society, and their eventual pairing off is incredibly sweet. You want these two to have a happy life together laughing at the absurdities of it all, and the ending coda points towards that they may have made it after all.
Duel in the Sun was intended by Selznick to rival, if not surpass, the gargantuan success of Gone with the Wind, and this one shares that film's lack of a directorial signature. Duel in the Sun is all Selznick for nearly three hours of pulpy horse opera and explosive carnality. It's one of my all-time favorite movies.
Jones reunites with Lionel Barrymore (who played a priest in Love Letters), Joseph Cotten, and Charles Bickford (a priest in The Song of Bernadette) here, but her best scenes involve Lillian Gish and Gregory Peck. After playing so many good girls, Selznick wanted to show that Jones had the potential to disappear into any role thrown her way and her cast her as the mixed-race bad girl torn between two brothers in a whopper of a romantic triangle. Yes, the politics of Jones in brownface are icky, and welcome to classic cinema were you will see your favorite stars playing dress-up in other races. (This wouldn't be the last time Jones would play someone with a mixed heritage either.)
Let's just admit it right now, Duel in the Sun is more fun for its vast strangeness and pulpy allure than many of its more prestigious brethren simply because it never tries to play as something it's not. This is a movie in the most gloriously epic, out-sized, and faintly ridiculously melodramatic ways imaginable. And Jones is dynamite in it. It's no secret that the Academy has an aversion towards comedy, but I like to think 1946 was such a strong year for her that she earned her Oscar nomination for both roles.
It is as Pearl Chavez that Jones not only gets another successful outlet for her grandiose emotional intensity, but a chance to really loosen up physically as well. The main thrust of her character is a love triangle that throbs with a sense of mutually assured destruction on one side and an inability to play the happy domestic wife with the other. Jones is thrust from the outset into fragile emotional terrain that she must carefully try to manage, and the effect is like watching someone try to gingerly walk across broken glass.
Throughout, Jones whips herself into a sexually overheated frenzy, and her face becomes something of an obsessively detailed canvas. The revolving director's seat briefly included Josef von Sternberg to give pointers on how to light and frame Jones in a manner similar to Marlene Dietrich a decade prior. Under the the watchful gaze of this, Jones gets to enact the full scope of her range as she goes from innocent ingenue to robustly physical temptress and ends as a feral avenger. She thrusts her full body into the part, often quite literally, and frequently threatens to go full camp, but she's never less than completely engrossing and a dangerous live-wire in the part.
Despite a persistent feeling that it will fly completely off the rails at any moment, Duel in the Sun somehow manages to work. Perhaps it's that it contains more pure movie-making and cinematic mythology in any single frame than other films do during their entire running times. And it's justifiably famous for the climatic duel where lovers Gregory Peck, deliciously playing the bad boy here, and Jones crawl across rocks and unload their resentments and bullets into each other. They end up wrapped in each other's arms, dying in an embrace as the camera pulls back as the score swells. It's utterly preposterous, but exactly the kind of spectacle that makes going to the movies so damn much fun.
It would be two years before Jones returned to the screen in Portrait of Jennie, a film that Selznick kept in production for roughly a little over a year. The results don't reflect this troubled birth as Portrait of Jennie is the single greatest film she's appeared in up to this point. Jones is Jennie, an apparition that functions as a soul-awakening lover and creative muse for Joseph Cotten. Jennie is more Cotten's film based purely on screen time, but Jones makes a lasting impression as the manic pixie dead girl.
Portrait of Jennie narrows its focus down to a series of tactile, specific emotional senses and narrative threads and spins them into a charming romantic fantasy. Much of this charm is tied into the refusal to even pretend that Jennie is tied at all to the corporeal world, and the film and characters meet the supernatural elements dead-on. As Ethel Barrymore's supportive art dealer argues, it doesn't matter if Jennie is real or a figment of Cotten's imagination, he believes she is real and that's all that matters.
Jones is a perfect match for this part that finds her taking the character from precocious little girl into a fully blossomed womanhood. She makes oblique references to things from the past and things yet to come, including a request that Cotten wait for her to grow up. Each time she reappears she's gotten older, but no less strange or ephemeral in her musings and haunted memories. The strength of Jones' performance is how effortless she makes of this appear.
She's bright and breathless as the young girl with a certain spark that retains itself throughout the performance as Jones essays her maturation. When she's gone from the film, the haunted quality that's so endemic to it is only enriched as she's so compulsively watchable when she appears. Jones had a quality that made her unknowable as an actress, a tendency to disappear into roles that left us wondering who the real person was behind the image, and that quality is in perfect harmony with this fey spirit girl.
And what an elegiac way to wrap up the on-screen pairings of Cotten and Jones. Portrait of Jennie might be the strongest of the four films they made together. A notorious bomb during its era yet time has only been kind to this film. The terror and majesty of love, obsession, and the creative process have rarely been as engrossing and tender as they are here.
Her first collaboration with director John Huston was a film in search of a coherent narrative and an identity. 1949's We Were Strangers wants to be about political insurgency in Cuba, and it wants to be a love story. It doesn't accomplish either goal. The political story is compromised, although Gilbert Roland and Ramon Novarro are stellar in their roles, and the romance is a no-go as Jones generates anti-chemistry with her leading man, John Garfield. Jones is also stuck with a questionable Cuban accent that comes and goes from scene-to-scene, and she generally appears mildly embarrassed throughout. It doesn't help that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Asphalt Jungle bookend this film, so its weaknesses only magnify in comparison to those towering artistic achievements.
Her work would mildly improve with Vincente Minnelli's flawed adaptation of Madame Bovary that same year. On a surface level, there's nothing particularly wrong with Madame Bovary, but there's a persistent feeling that there's something missing from it. Or maybe it's several small somethings that piled-up. It's hard to say what exactly is wrong, but Minnelli has forsaken emotional depth for beautiful artifice here and it suffers.
As does Jones' performance. Jones possessed a lot of raw talent that a small handful of directors could funnel and finesse, but she wasn't one to fill-in the writing gaps with personality like the truly greats do. It's a curious case, but Minnelli manages to get two great scenes out of her before the final curtain. One is the infamous waltz sequence, a sustained piece of melodrama that ranks high in Minnelli's filmography. Jones' Emma Bovary is gaily laughing and dancing, proving a sensation among the French glitterati of the era, and quickly catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. It's a brief moment, but Jones' face manages to communicate so much in it as she switches from head-spinning romanticism to cold and calculating in an instant. Just as good is a later scene where Emma is dancing alone in her hotel room trying to recapture the night, and Jones is a woman possessed before seeing herself in a cracked mirror and the illusion shatters.
Yet no scene better summarizes her on-screen/off-screen binary better than the waltz's abrupt ending as her drunken husband ruins her triumphant night. Replace Van Heflin with Selznick, the French high society with Hollywood's movers and shakers, and try to tell me that this scene doesn't work as an unintentional bit of self-reflection from its star. This bit of biography for Jones only enriches the sequence as a whole.
She'd give the performance of her career for the Archers, the creative duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in 1950's Gone to Earth. While not quite the equal of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, Gone to Earth is a surprisingly little gem of a movie. Freed from the constricting influence of Selznick, Jones gives a performance free of her tics and bad habits that started popping up in many of her prior films.
Gone to Earth is about Hazel, a woman in constant commune with nature and her pet fox, Foxy, and the love triangle that develops between her, the straight-laced parson (Cyril Cusack), and a horny lord (David Farrar). The Archers treat the material as though it were a fable about the conflicts between paganism and Christianity, nature and civilization, and how heaven and hell are real places well within reach in our world if you know where to look for them.
Hazel doesn't just know where to look, but finds herself often wedged between the two and warring with her emotional intelligence and unbridled sexual needs. Jones won her Oscar for playing a virginal saint but she's always better playing characters in heat. Here she is not only allowed to indulge in her emotional intensity but her carnality causes chaos for everyone that comes within her orbit. She also manages to pull off a Welsh accent, and accents were frequently a hurdle.
The genius of the film is all right there in the opening scene as Hazel and Foxy are escaping from a largely unseen pack of hounds giving chase. It's a confluence of sound design, glorious color, and Jones' performance that makes it play out as both a horrifying nightmare and a symphonic piece of fairy tale-like artwork come to life. It's repeated at the end with a different outcome as the hounds chasing them have come to represent so much, the complexities of love, sex, desire, religion, and propriety descending on these two to snuff out their bright lights and freedoms.
It's the mystical and fairy tale-like overtones that keep Gone to Earth from tripping itself into tortured and conventional melodrama. Hazel often refers to a book left behind by her mother and her fateful choices are never completed without consulting it first. It's as if she were looking at a spiritual guide in not just the book but the trees and hills of the Welsh landscape. The book is filled with bits of lore and spells from pagan beliefs, and Hazel never looks towards the confines of patriarchal religion to find her answers. Within Jones' performance we believe that this woman can hear and speak with the wind, with the faerie folk and superstitions lingering around her imagination.
This one would also bomb at the box office, and its failure would mark the beginning of the end for the Archers creative partnership and Jones' days as a a leading lady. Yet Gone to Earth feels ripe for a rediscovery, and it's practically screaming out for a release from Criterion. Never one to leave well enough alone, Selznick obtained American distribution rights to the film and edited it into something more basic and conventional. Rouben Mamoulian was brought in to shoot new scenes, it was re-titled The Wild Heart, and much of the emotional and sexual complexity from the narrative was removed. The Wild Heart was released in 1952 where it was a bomb.
1952 was another year that saw Jones in two releases, but unlike 1946's two-fer, these are easily forgettable entries in her filmography. Ruby Gentry is equal parts swampland noir and southern-fried melodrama, and it all equals a pulpy mess of lurid proportions that buckles under miscasting, a cliche-ridding script, a pervading sense of predictability, and a needless narration. Jones is fine, but if it feels like you've seen this performance before and done better it's because you have. Twice, actually in Duel in the Sun and Gone to Earth. Whereas Charlton Heston is typically wooden, generates zero chemistry with Jones, and is lacking in sexual magnetism and charm that would indicate why Jones' Ruby is so obsessed with him. The only things that make Ruby Gentry tolerable are the climatic scene in the misty swamp and Karl Malden's layered performance that gives this material more poetry than it's worth.
William Wyler's adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is marred by the production code, and the material is never given the treatment it deserves. Much like Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Wyler's Carrie has a feeling of the major players merely doing something that's good but not good enough. Both films share a sense that there's a core missing from them.
Despite being the title character, Jones is really a character who is reacted upon and to more than she changes or develops. It's Laurence Olivier's George Hurstwood who experiences the most growth. In terms of technical skill, Olivier is acting Jones off the map, but he never disappears into the role in the same way that Jones does. Olivier is giving us one of his Brechtian performances, and this choice makes the tragedy feel lessened and at an arm's-length. Whereas Jones is merely existing as Carrie throughout, and we believe completely that she's this naive girl trying to capture her American Dream. Not helping matters is a clear lack of chemistry between them, and the central romance of the film never generates any heat as a result.
The script calls for Olivier to give pound after pound of flesh, but the film never gets under the skin of these characters. There's some pleasing supporting players (Miriam Hopkins and Eddie Albert), pretty images, and it's a perfectly serviceable tearjerker, but there was the prospective for so much more here. Carrie is just another one of Jones' creative misfires, something that would populate her career from the beginning until the end.
She reunited with John Huston for 1953's Beat the Devil, a cult comedy/adventure classic. There's a pervasive sense that the entire film is taking place with gigantic quotes around all of the action and characters. There's an even stronger sense that the film is making itself up as it goes along, not dissimilar a sensation as watching an improv troupe spinning out a story on the spot.
Once you get on the film's wavelength you'll find something deeply, wonderfully strange. Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida play a married couple stationed in an Italian seaport waiting for repairs to be completed on a boat. They are working with a motley crew of character actors, including the great Peter Lorre and delightfully pompous Robert Morley, to buy up large plots of land in Africa that are rich in uranium. Into this story wanders a British couple, Jones and Edward Underdown, with mysterious motives that cause the eventual chaos and unraveling of it all.
If that sounds fairly indecipherable, then I've described the "plot" well enough. Beat the Devil's charms aren't in the plot, which plays out like Huston doing a satiric spin on the material he would make with a straight-face before and after this film, but in the generally weird hangout vibe of it all. The group of character actors are uniformly wonderful, Bogart plays his romantic cynic persona with a raised eyebrow, but it's Jones that surprises us with hell of a knockout comedic performance.
Lubitsch had tapped into her prior potential as a comedic actress, and Huston underscores just how good she is at it. She wears a blonde wig, speaks in a plummy English accent, talks without any identifiable punctuation, and tells one humdinger of a lie after another. It's a dizzy, oddball role, and Jones is clearly having a blast doing it. Jones knows that Beat the Devil is a tongue-in-cheek piece of kitsch, and she knows how to play beautifully towards that tone. It makes you wish she had further chances at delivering lighter, funnier roles.
Sadly, Beat the Devil bombed nearly immediately at the box office, but it just as quickly started to find a fringe following. Bogart hated it, Jones said Huston promised her she'd be remembered more for it than Bernadette, and the feeling of watching a group of drunk, lusty, crazy people interacting with each other is not for everyone. All it wants to do is bemuse and entertain you for its 90 minutes, and it excels at this. It's a masterpiece of kooky, eccentric camp cinema. It would also prove to be the last satisfying lead role Jones would get in her career.
Much like what he did with the Archers and Gone to Earth, Selznick butchered her next film with a European auteur. Vittorio de Sica's Terminal Station is a noble failure, a glimpse of a romance as it crumbles with vignettes surrounding it at the title location, but what Selznick did to it is an encapsulation of all the ways he harmed Jones' career. He took her character and through judicious editing turned her into a one-dimensional creation, all of the fire and passion smothered out of her. Selznick and de Sica were clearly working at cross-purposes, but Selznick's version of the film (released with the groaner of a title, Indiscretion of an American Wife) is just bad.
Not that de Sica's original was a crowning achievement, but it's more fascinating and engaging than the American cut. The best thing about both versions of the film is the meeting of Jones with Montgomery Clift. They're a visually appealing pair of actors with their raven hair, thick eyebrows, intense emotional vulnerability, simmering neurosis, and prominent cheekbones. They appear to be acting in two different movies: Jones in a traditional Hollywood sudsy romance, and Clift is clearly aiming for truth and realism in a more traditional de Sica film.
1955's Love is a Many-Splendored Thing would prove to be Jones' last critical and commercial triumph as a leading lady. Nearly ten years after her last Oscar nomination, this film would land Jones her fifth and final career nomination. Once again, Jones plays a biracial character, this time a Eurasian doctor in love with a white man and the melodramatic complications that ensue. Love is a Many-Splendored Thing is material beneath both Jones and William Holden's talents, but they play it all well enough and know how to maximize it for effect.
The score is bombastic and does much of the heavy-lifting for your emotional cues. The entire film is high-camp schmaltz with a deeply uncomfortable bit of racial animosity burbling throughout. This thing has aged like milk, and I can't help but wonder what a director like Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray would have made out of this material.
I wasn't joking when I said it was all downhill after Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Look no further than Good Morning, Miss Dove's teacher hagiography. A piece of treacle that demands your tears and will pull out all of the devious tricks it knows in order to flagellate you into feeling something, anything. It's artifice in the worst ways, and Jones' performance is no better than the closed off and frosty film orbiting around her. She merely lies down, suffering silently as the film unspools a series of flashbacks, and Jones looks unconvincing in her grey wig and old age makeup.
1956's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit reunited Jones with Gregory Peck for a slog of a film about post-war social and economic anxieties. The entire thing is overly long with a story that cannot support so punishing a running time, and it fails to engage throughout. Jones' eyebrows and mouth twitch and move around separate from her emotional catatonia, as if they were giving the entirety of the performance on their own.
Things don't entirely improve with 1957's The Barretts of Wimpole Street, an artificial film with a stilted performance from Jones. It's perfunctory through and through, but John Gielgud gives a wonderful performance as the demanding, emotionally abusive father. A Farewell to Arms, released that same year, was no better as it destroys Ernest Hemingway's spare, unadorned prose with Selznick's Sturm und Drang. Jones is flagrantly overacting here, Rock Hudson looks adrift, only Elaine Stritch and Vittorio de Sica (Oscar nominated for his work) make this overblown mess tolerable viewing during their scenes. A Farewell to Arms was met with critical scorn, and it's reputation has not improved with age. It would be Selznick's last production, and Jones would only make a further four films after this.
After a five year absence from the screen, Jones returned with 1962's Tender is the Night, the last film she would make during Selznick's lifetime. While Selznick had no official credit or participation in the film, old habits die hard and he inundated the project with memos about how the material should be adapted and how best to utilize Jones. It's hard to know just how much, if any, of these ideas made it into the final product, but it does display many of his foibles. Tender is the Night is too long, and further proof of just how hard it is to adapt a writer as interior as F. Scott Fitzgerald onto an external medium.
Yet for all of its faults, Jones' central performance is one final hurrah as she expertly navigates her Zelda Fitzgerald proxy's madness, recovery, and episodic fits. Jones had her own history of mental illness and emotional turbulence, and those autobiographical demons find a perfect extension in the role. She's a marvel despite being about twenty years too old for the part. While the script may fail to successfully transition Jason Robards' F. Scott proxy's downfall, it gives Jones the last substantial role of her career.
The only supporting player worth anything is Joan Fontaine as her older sister, and she goes for broke in the part. Not in an overacting way, but in a way that artistically channels the unintentionally callous and vacuous glitterati of Fitzgerald's work. Fontaine and Robards have several tense scenes where she throws money at the problem, not in an effort to be cruel, but in a way that suggest this is the only way to problem-solve that she knows. Tender is the Night needed more of this character building and empathy and far less of surface-level glitz and glamour it traffics in.
Selznick died in 1965, and Jones was clearly adrift and semi-retired from acting. Her choice of material, limited to only three roles between 1966 and her death in 2009, was suspect. 1966's The Idol finds Jones engaging in a one-night stand with the bad boy friend (Michael Parks) of her son (John Leyton), and she's ill-suited to the part. Much of The Idol is listless and mean-spirited where it's clearly trying to get us to feel empathy towards its "tortured" bad boy, and there's a strange undercurrent of implied incestuous attraction between Jones and Leyton. None of it is successfully explored or defined, and The Idol is a dull misfire and rightfully obscure.
Twenty-five years after winning her Oscar, Jones appeared in Angel, Angel, Down We Go, also widely known as Cult of the Damned. An aggressive, peculiar film that appears to relish its campiness. It's not a good movie by any stretch, but it is a fascinating one in its awfulness and overwrought nature. It also gives us the sight of Saint Bernadette declaring, "I made 30 stag films and I never faked an orgasm!" Trust me, this alone makes the strange, head trip journey that is this film nearly worth it. It's a bit like watching Gloria Grahame, another Oscar winner that burned out fast, spending her final film appearances in Z-grade horror schlock. Thankfully, this wouldn't prove to be her final film role.
She remarried in 1971 to Norton Simon, the billionaire industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist. Through Simon, Jones' later life would change drastically as she would soon devote all of her time away from the spotlight doing philanthropic works. Her final film role was in 1974's The Towering Inferno. All in all, it's not the worst final film role for a former great lady of the screen to have. She gets to romance Fred Astaire, work with Paul Newman to save two kids (one of them being Bobby Brady), and gets a shocking death scene.
Jones is actually quite touching here. She's clearly delighted in her dance scene with Astaire, and who wouldn't be, and fiercely noble and maternal in her scenes with the kids. There's even a chance to watch a great lady engage in some minor stunt work. The Towering Inferno is one of the more grandly entertaining and better made disaster films from the 70s, of which there were a great many to choose from. It's got all of the markings of a possible return - she's part of an ensemble of stars both new and old, she gets a few big scenes, and it was a big hit both commercially and critically, eight Oscar nods including Best Picture - yet it didn't further her career in any way.
I think Astaire's final scene where he learns of her death is a good symbolic image of saying goodbye to Jones. He refuses to accept this as a reality until her pet cat is presented to him, and he tenderly clutches to it as if seeking comfort. For all the problems of her filmography, for the questioning of what her career would be like without her Svengali, she possessed a magnetic, ephemeral quality that was absolutely sensational in the right film/role. She seemed made of stronger stuff than she let on, and that core of survivor's strength powers through many of her roles.
In 1976, her daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, committed suicide, and this painful incident led to Jones' interest in mental health issues. She would start a foundation in 1980 to provide research and resources into mental health advocacy and treatment, and work as a Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Norton Simon Museum from 1993 until 2003, when she was granted emeritus status. She made brief appearances at various Academy Award ceremonies, most notably during tributes to past winners in 1998 and 2003, and during Gregory Peck's AFI tribute in 1989, but mostly stayed busy with her philanthropic efforts and away from the public eye.
There were two attempts to return to acting in the early 1980s, one as Jean Harris, a project abandoned when Ellen Burstyn appeared in a 1981 TV movie, and the other was Terms of Endearment. She bought the rights to the book, and hired James L. Brooks to write the screenplay as a star vehicle for her big screen return. Brooks eventually convinced Paramount Pictures to buy the rights from Jones and argued that the role shouldn't be tailored to any one actress. When he won the Oscar for his screenplay, Brooks thanked Jones personally.
After these two abandoned attempts at acting, by all accounts Jones lived a happy and quiet retirement. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 90 leaving behind a conflicted film legacy, but she's absolutely stellar and a large part of the success in at least seven of her films. Her range was broader than frequently given credit, and she possessed a sterling ability to command the screen in intense close-up. She remains fascinating for the ways in which she manages to both transcend and be hampered by the movie star/serious actor duality.
This tribute from the 1987 Oscars does a grand job summarizing the high-points of her film career, including her Saint Bernadette, youthful sweetness in Since You Went Away, romantic swooning with Joseph Cotten, the waltz from Madame Bovary, and her destructive erotic allure in Duel in the Sun.
My Essential Viewing recommendations:
Cluny Brown
Duel in the Sun
Portrait of Jennie
Gone to Earth
Beat the Devil
Honorable Mentions:
The Song of Bernadette
Love Letters
The Towering Inferno
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