Jenny

This is a boring mess. It tries to combine cinema verite', neo-realism, artistic montages, reverse camera angles, and improvisation. The two leads are boring and insipid characters that no one could care about -- not even themselves. It pretends to have a bold statement to make about single motherhood. And the statement turns out to be, "Isn't it sad?" Unless you have a mad desire to occupy your life with this mess for two hours, skip it.

This is a little piece of autobiography, I suspect. It is really best for giving you a glimpse into some chapter of the screenwriter's life or the life of someone he knew. This is in part a story of New York City and the film makers's lfestyle there. It is about a contrast between the educated and sophisticated and a simpler person. Or at least this is a subtext of the movie, I think.

On the surface, this is about a young girl who gets impregnated by someone who was/is a friend of a NYC filmmaker. He makes commercials. It is an all comsuming business for him. He is knowledgeable and sophisticated. Some friend of his impregnated some country girl who made it to New York. Then this friend moves away and Alda, the filmmaker, is placed in the position of having this pregnant, naive young girl living with him. I think the impregator-friend was his roommate, and now Jenny, the pregnant young girl, is moving into the apartment, after the friend has left town. Or something like that.

Well, Alda at first does not have much sympathy or room in his life for this girl. He sort of ignores her. But they develop a relationship. And so forth.

Not bad, and sort of a window into time and into a certain subculture.

The less said, the better. Even worse than Clint Eastwood's THE BEGUILED.

TV icons Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda star in this romance set against the threat of the Vietnam War. Thomas plays Jenny, a shy, moony girl from Connecticut who has come to New York City after she gets pregnant. Alda plays a callow young filmmaker named Delano (after FDR) who makes TV commercials. They meet in Central Park when she wanders into his shot as he filming a bag lady (Charlotte Rae).

It seems she got pregnant at a drive-in, carried away by the romantic story of A PLACE IN THE SUN. He has a girlfriend Kay (Marian Hailey) and is afraid of being drafted and sent to war. As the draft threat looms, he learns that married men with children are being exempted so he strikes a deal with lonely Jenny to get married. She saves him from the draft; he takes care of her and her baby. While this all starts out as a practical arrangement, what are the odds against its turning into real love?

Jenny is too entrenched in her dreams of romance to understand the grim reality of being an unwed mother. Delano is too selfish to really care much about Jenny or even his current girlfriend. It all gets complicated by Jenny's lies to her parents (Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson) about who Delano really is.

While Gardenia and Wilson come off well as the slightly daffy parents, and Hailey is quite good as the understanding Kay, the characters of Jenny and Delano are not terribly sympathetic. Alda and Thomas can't seem to add enough warmth to make these characters likable. Minor characters like Rae's bag lady and a lonely man (Phil Bruns) Jenny meets spark more interest than the central characters.

JENNY is very much a film of its time. The Vietnam War dominated life for young people of that era. And while they are not radicals in any sense of the word, Delano and Jenny are caught in the war's long web. Even their eventual marriage takes place under a bleak picture of Richard Nixon on the wall.

Strange little movie made in New York, in 1969. Almost feels like a film student's graduation piece. Sometimes the sound is terrible or the inappropriate soundtrack drowns out the dialogue. Another disappointment is that there isn't much location or atmosphere, so you really don't get the feel of the time or the place, which is often the fun aspect of seeing films of this period.

But the character development is good. The characters grow on you in an intriguing way. It's the sort of movie that's nice to catch on TV on a wet Sunday afternoon and the sort of movie they should run on wet Sunday afternoons but for some reason remains in the archives forever.

If you like Marlo Thomas and or Alan Alda, it's interesting to see them in their youth. Sometimes their performances seem wooden, partly due to the often poor direction, other times quite sensitive and as I said, intriguing. I'm glad I watched it.