Under the firm hand of Henry King, known in his time as one of the best translators of literature into film, F.Scott Fitzerald's "Tender Is the Night" reaches its conclusion as a solid but rather cold drama. Produced with the usual ornaments of any Fox motion picture of those years, the shooting in real and colorful European locations and the vast CinemaScope compositions seem to go in opposite direction to the intimate drama with four key characters: a psychiatrist (Jason Robards), his patient and wife (Jennifer Jones), his old and wise mentor (Paul Lukas) and his rich sister-in-law (Joan Fontaine). Around them there are a frustrated composer (a very obnoxious character played by Tom Ewell, that guarantees that the title song is played endlessly), a starlet (Jill St. John), a wealthy Roman with nothing to do (Cesare Danova), and other characters that advance or retard the plot. There is not a single close-up in the film to get us close to those faces, not as a voyeuristic act to see their pores, wrinkles or grimaces, but as a most useful syntactic resource of cinema language. Everything is seen from a distance, with extreme prudence, aggravated by the fact that the film extends to 2 hours and 22 minutes that screenwriter Ivan Moffat should have prevented, or editor William Reynolds could have reduced. Maybe in a film house with a huge screen it worked better. After "Tender Is the Night" and 50 years in the film industry, Henry King retired from cinema.
Review of Tender Is the Night
