Screen legend Jennifer Jones dead at 90

Academy Award winning actress, Jennifer Jones died Thursday December 17. Jones was one of the biggest stars of the 1940s and 1950s; she received a total of five Academy Award nominations, winning the award with her first starring performance in The Song of Bernadette (1943).

A star is born
Jones met her first husband, Robert Walker, while both were studying acting in New York. As a young married couple, they decided to give Hollywood a try and headed west. Jones's career took off faster than Walker's. She caught the eye of producer David O. Selznik, who carefully managed her career. After divorcing Walker, Selznik and Jones were married in 1949. Their marriage lasted until Selznik's death in 1965.

Portrait of an actress
As a movie star, Jones seemed to specialize in complicated melodrama's or over-the-top epics like Duel in the Sun (1946). Although Duel in the Sun was generally panned by critics, the public loved it and it was one of the top grossing films of all time. When given the proper vehicle, Jones proved she was a capable and competent actress with winning performances in Love Letters (1945), Portrait of Jenny (1948), and probably her most underrated, but truly brilliant performance in Cluny Brown (1946), directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Enduring popularity
In the 1950s, Jones's popularity was still solid, with lead roles in films like Carrie (1952), costarring Laurence Olivier, Ruby Gentry (1952), with a young Charlton Heston, and probably her most memorable role from this period, Love is a Many Splendid Thing (1955) opposite William Holden, for which she received her fifth and final Academy Award nomination. Her last major film role was in the disaster epic, The Towering Inferno (1974), which featured an all-star cast that included Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, and Fred Astaire.

A very private life
In contrast to her career as a world-famous movie star, Jones was a very private person who avoided the limelight. Fortunately, she's left us a wonderful body of work that will live on for many years to come.

Val Lewton: The genius nobody knows

Val Lewton is credited with elevating the horror film to artistic levels during the 1940s. At RKO he set a standard few filmmakers have matched. When other horror films of the period featured creatures and monsters that didn’t exist, Lewton’s movies were populated with ordinary people. The horror did not come from monsters or demons, but from neighbors, coworkers, and those in positions of authority. And Lewton knew that nothing on screen could match the horrors conjured up inside the mind of the viewer. By combining believable characters, literate scripts, film noir-like cinematography, and clever editing, Lewton’s films drummed up more suspense and horror than all the monsters on the Universal lot combined…and that was his goal. Not only were Lewton’s films truly frightening, but they explored unusual (for the times) themes like psychosexual frustration (Cat People) and hints of lesbianism (The Seventh Victim). Alfred Hitchcock would explore these themes further in films like Spellbound, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, and Marni.

Lewton started his movie career working for David O. Selznick as a story editor. While working for Selznick, Lewton had a hand in shaping movie classics like A Tale of Two Cities (1935), A Star is Born (1937), and Rebecca (1940), among others. He’s famous for advising Selznick against buying the rights to Gone with the Wind, calling it “ponderous trash.” Lewton managed to survive that blunder, but he grew tired of working for Selznick.


In 1942, Lewton was named head of the newly formed horror unit at RKO. At the time of his hire, RKO was in financial straits because of their costly relationship with Orson Welles and the failures of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons to connect with the public. Lewton’s task was to make horror films that: cost under $150,000 per picture, did not run more than 75 minutes, and used the lurid titles supplied to him by the studio bosses. Starting with Cat People in 1942, Lewton produced a string of successful horror films that helped keep RKO in the black. At RKO, Lewton collaborated with director Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, Way of a Gaucho) and gave Robert Wise (The Set Up, The Sound of Music) and Mark Robson (Champion, The Bridges at Toko-Ri) their first assignments as film directors. Although not a household name, Lewton left an indelible mark on the horror film genre and influenced numerous filmmakers, including William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese, George Romero, as well as the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock to name a few.