Word: unreality
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...story concerns a Manhattan artist, Joseph Cotton, who is striving to find himself, and the, unreal Jenny, or Jennifer Jones, who becomes his inspiration. He meets her first in Central Park, notes her pre-World. War costume and later discovers the newspaper she is clutching dates from the turn of the century. As he grows to know her better, the artist becomes more wary of the ethereal quality of his friend and there are several good scenes as the two talk about the future and the past, one never believing the other, but never really doubting. His Portrait of Jenny...
This indigestible lump of melodrama is leavened now & again by a stretch of slapstick which is equally unreal. The only real moments, in fact, are provided by Gloria Grahame, who proves once again, as she did by her performance as the sullen taxi dancer in Crossfire, that she can be one of Hollywood's most convincing chippies...
...First Communist. Father Molnar explained his peculiar faith to his visitors, just as his congregation was leaving his hilltop church, the women placid in bright calico skirts, the men proud in black Sunday suits and polished black boots. Father Molnar has built up an unreal paradoxical world in which history's most sharply opposite faiths are fantastically synthesized. He declared himself a strong believer in Marxism, but he maintained that spiritual guidance remained the clergy's rightful monopoly. On his bookshelf, he keeps church literature next to Stalin's Problems of Leninism. Marx's Kapital...
...other extraordinary scene is laid in a Franciscan monastery where three Army chaplains--Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish--seek refuge. War has passed by the monks, leaving them in their unreal tranquillity with no concern greater than the aim of converting the Protestant and the Jew. The monks are oblivious to the Catholic chaplain's attempts to reason with them; he begs them to accept the fact that the two "heathen" are just as religious in their own way--but the monks can only sit fasting in horrified silence...
...picture is especially noteworthy for its lack of Hollywood exaggeration or unreal emotion, although it strains at one touch of sentimentality when the inmates tearfully sing "Going Home" at an asylum dance. Except for this minor defect, the film's purity aids it in revealing the dark horrors of mental disease at the bottom of a snake...