Tendre est la nuit

This movie was a flop at the time and has been pretty much forgotten, which is a shame. It's a faithful adaptation of F.Scott Fitzgerald's moving story which is a touch lifeless, but still worthwhile.

The plot is ofcourse very good, a love story which is intriguing and very sad. There is perhaps not quite enough emotion throughout most of the film, but by the time the end comes the film has become pretty moving. Jason Robards was definately miscast as Dick Dyver [a good name for a porn star!]but Jennifer Jones shows what a good actress she sometimes could be ,especially when she is displaying her character's 'madness' ,if that's not too strong a word. None of the supporting characters are as interesting as they should be except Jill St John's aspiring actress and there is somehow little feel for the period, but the strength of the story just about carries one through. Mention should be made of Bernard Herrmann's often touching [if a bit self derivative!]music, but having the film's theme song [which he did not write] played endlessly on the piano by one character gets a bit annoying.

Despite it's flaws ,this is a fairly solid romantic drama that probably seemed old fashioned even in 1962, but deserves some reappraisal.

Despite David O. Selznick's omnipresence whenever his wife was involved in a film even if it wasn't his own, director Henry King managed to make a fine film adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald's celebrated autobiographical novel, Tender Is The Night. Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards, Jr. are nothing short of wonderful in the leads.

A lot of the personal lives of both the leads went into roles of Nicole and Dick Diver. Jennifer Jones saw enough tragedy in her life for about five people and saw the inside of mental institutions a few times while on the mortal coil. And Jason Robards love of the grape was also well known.

Robards purportedly is Fitzgerald himself who fell in love with a high flying millionairess Zelda Sayre and the easy living he became accustomed to sapped his creative energy. In this work Robards is a psychiatrist who forgot professional ethics and fell in love with his patient. Zelda Fitzgerald also saw the inside of an asylum, but no one ever affected a lasting cure for her.

The two live in real luxury as American expatriates in Europe and 20th Century Fox spent no small expense turning the locations in Europe like the Riviera, Paris, and Zurich into what they looked like in the Twenties. Bernard Herrmann wrote a musical score that interwove more melodies from that era than I could count.

Robards falls in love with the beautiful Jones as he helps bring her out of her mental illness. The Code was as omnipresent as David O. Selznick and the barest hint of the cause of her illness was made because talk of incest was still a big taboo. It would take Chinatown more than ten years later to bring that sin into the open on screen. One thing that wasn't included from the novel was a theme of miscegenation as well in deference to our Southern audiences still not the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights revolution. Fascinating as to what was considered worse by Hollywood box office standards in 1962.

Joan Fontaine plays Jennifer's older sister and custodian of the family legacy. The father was one of those robber baron tycoons who committed suicide and of course it was that and the incest that drove Jones to her illness. Fontaine totally misreads Robards as a fortune hunter, but since he's pried the family's dirty secret from Jennifer's mind, better to have him in the family. Because of Jennifer's illness Fontaine controls the family purse strings.

Loving Jones and at the same time resentful of being tied financially to her, Robards loses professional detachment. This was something he should have learned from his mentor Paul Lukas who has a small part. Tender Is The Night is an object lesson about not getting involved with a patient personally.

Tom Ewell as a Broadway composer who has lost his muse in alcohol has a good role as a kind of hanger on to the Robards/Jones party world. He's a good ornament to have at a party. I believe his role might be based on Vincent Youmans who gave up his career to both tuberculosis and to a drinking problem. The theme song by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster also serves as a symbol of a lot of unfinished lives. Ewell keeps playing the melody and he can't complete it. When someone else does he takes it all wrong and tragedy ensues.

The title song Tender Is The Night is one of my favorite movie melodies. I have a recording of it by Tony Martin and it received the only Academy Award nomination the film had. The song lost to the title song of another fine film, The Days Of Wine And Roses. Personally I like Tender Is The Night much better.

Tender Is The Night was the farewell directing assignment for Henry King who in his long career directed some of the best films 20th Century Fox ever made. For some reason he's not considered at the very top of his profession and I think it's because he was contracted to one studio and stayed there. I think the reasoning is that if you're the very best you can go from studio to studio and you must be the best if everyone wants you. A contract director like King just gets assignments. But King always did his films with a certain amount elegance to them and so what if he toiled only at one dream factory. Guys like King and Woody Van Dyke and Clarence Brown at MGM always get a short shrift when discussing directors.

Fitzgerald purists will not be crazy about Tender Is The Night, but I think it holds up very well almost fifty years after its first release. Really top flight entertainment.

**spoiler alert**

This movie does not have the greatest reputation in the world. I'd read that Jennifer Jones was too old to play Nicole, that she overacts, that she has no chemistry with Jason Robards, that it was too long, etc.

Well don't believe it!

It DID take me several attempts to watch the whole thing, but that nothing to do with the movie, that had to do with something else. When

I finally saw the whole thing all the way through, I enjoyed it very much and questioned why it does not have more admirers.

It explores many themes, thoughtfully and without exploitation. Should a doctor romance his patient? When does the patient stop being a patient, exactly, and start being a person?

Nicole meets Dick in a sanitarium. She's there for a variety of reasons, none of which sister Joan Fontaine really care to discuss. It has something to do with their father. Nicole eventually is released and runs into Dick years later, and they get married. They have a wonderful life and two children but it starts to fall apart. Not because of Nicole's mental state - actually, as it turns out, she becomes the stable one. But a friend of theirs (Tom Ewell, making a fool of himself as a chronic drunk) dies, their daughter almost dies from alcohol poisoning, and Dick is see with an actress (Jill St. John) at a brawl in a café and their picture makes all the front pages.

Jennifer Jones is prone to be very mannered. In spite of them she's still a favorite, but here she's really very good, she's not too old to play the part, and her chemistry with Robards is believable. Fontaine doesn't do much but enjoy her own wardrobe. As I mentioned, Ewell is a drunk but his death scene (or, rather, the circumstances surrounding it) are the worse thing in the movie. Jill St. John is first seen as a youngster but she matures as the movie progresses..unfortunately, her acting does not improve.

At over 2 1/2 hours, its an investment, but worth your time. Now I want to watch it again. 8/10.

When this was released I managed to see most films first-run, except the ones clearly aimed at my age group. (Such a snob, n'est-ce pas?!?) So, being a fan of both Jennifer and Joan, I went to a Los Angeles-area theater with top-notch projection and sound. Back then Twentieth-Century Fox rarely stinted on sending companies to the actual locales of the stories being filmed, so this one has plenty of its share of gorgeous shots set in Switzerland and elsewhere on the Continent, as I recall.

But, as other comments herein attest, the rest is somewhat of a disappointment. Henry King, the director, seemed to encourage Jennifer Jones in some of her less-attractive mannerisms which somehow were not so apt as a rendition of her character's mental distress. Jason Robards, Jr. was never much of a success as a romantic lead, in my opinion. And Joan Fontaine was assigned the rather thankless role of a rich "bitch." All in all it's a prime example of how the studio "system" was growing out of touch with an ever-younger movie audience. Nevertheless for those of us who have always appreciated luxurious eye candy, it was a fairly tasty treat.

and stilted about this film, and its casting.

Jason Robards who always delivers, just seems wooden and ineffectual as Dick Diver. Jennifer Jones as the ever desirable, but tragic Nicole Diver, just seems unsympathetic, even strident and cruel.

The alcohol flows freely and the jet-set lifestyle is invoked by a humorous Tom Ewell, who sings the movies theme song at the beginning of this disjointed movie. (Tom Ewell is forever planted in my memory as Marilyn Monroes bumbling neighbor in "The Seven Year Itch", or as the silly, clichéd father in "State Fair") That being said, it almost seems as if the writers did not know how to treat the subject of psychoanalysis and mental illness. F Scott Fitgerald and his wife endured tragedy, his wife Zelda Sayre Fitgerald was diagnosed with schizophrenia while still in her 20's. She was delusional at times, and probably never walked around at all times looking like a John Robert Powers model,(as Jones does in this movie).

It was 1962 after all, psychoanalysis was chic and stylish, so this film presents the illness as stylish and merely the effect of being rich and bored on the French Riviera. I wanted to like this film, but it is sorely dated and due for a remake. If nothing else it aptly demonstrates society stigma and misconceptions when portraying mental illness. No wonder there is still so much denial, if this film was considered an acceptable story of a physician and his wife in 1962. Worth seeing as a curiosity. 5/10.