Word: timeless
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Robert Nathan's "Portrait of Jenny" manages to express a complex idea in such simple terms that its artistic virtuosity is often overlooked. Nathan's main character is a timeless, ethereal creature, sometimes real and sometimes so strange that her reality seems dubious. She grows up at her own speed, appears and disappears at will. Her sense of time is unusual; she remembers events of fifty years ago in terms of yesterday and she knows in strange and unexplicable ways the partial shape of the future...
Hollywood has takes ever Jenny's story with results that although generally good, bog down rather sadly in one particular--a mistaken impression that a point made ones can be made fifth times. The plot is largely the same as Nathan left it, but whereas Nathan achieved his timeless effect unobtrusively, the movie continually harps on the strange by-products of Jenny's memory and her miraculous ability to hop about in time...
Just to make sure of his point, Selznick decided to close his opus on a more tangible note than timelessness and ends with a hurricane scene that completely breaks the mood of the picture, literally winding it up on the rocks. An additional battery of loudspeakers is spotted around the theater; during the storm scene, they are filled with sounds of wind and surf. The trade calls this device Multi-Sound and it is when the wind is screaming the loudest, and everyone is wondering what has become of the fresh air, that Jenny appears for the last time...
...Lampoon was a very unfunny magazine. This paradox has been properly destroyed by the recent efforts of the two publications. The latest issue of the Lampoon contains some really topnotch cartoons and, more surprising, some amusing stories. The cartoon, "The New Overcoat," by Fred Gwynne, is timeless and rich enough to rate reprinting in the Lampoon in ten years or so, as will probably be the case...
...Tristram and Yseult legend is indeed timeless. Unfortunately Howard's play is not. Perhaps this is because it is untrue to the legend. It is a comedy; sympathy is with the husband, his wife loves him after all, and the lover goes off to 'Frisco. The poignancy of the husband's forgiveness is thus lost, doubly so today with the stigma of adultery in its present washed-out condition...