Trailer—Jenny

source: Jenny

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.

Marlo Thomas plays Jenny, a single, naïve working girl living on her own who has managed to get herself pregnant (she was afraid of asking her family doctor for birth control pills, but since she doesn't live at home anymore this seems like a flimsy excuse). She's intent on raising the child alone until she meets a director of commercials in the park who has 30 days before he'll be inducted involuntarily into the Army. They go out on a date, realize they're both in a jam, and he proposes marriage--to him, it's just a way to dodge the draft (he already has a steady girlfriend), but she wants to feel like a real bride. George Bloomfield co-wrote and directed this rather simplistic drama that could have cut much deeper, but between Thomas' mood swings and Alan Alda's morose state (to show us his indifference) there aren't many opportunities for substantial drama. She wants to discuss baby names, he doesn't care; he wants to go out with his friends, she wants to stay home with him and be a couple. Bloomfield gets some very good moments from Thomas' situation in dealing with her Republican parents (a baffling couple played by Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson, who played practically the same characters a year later in "Little Murders"). Unfortunately, Bloomfield doesn't know how to mount his story without resorting to melodrama (few of his ideas are fresh, and he runs out of them awfully fast). Thomas acts more simply and plainly than on her TV series "That Girl"; she still dresses like a fashionable big city waif, but the lower-key she affects here is engaging for a while (before the movie falls apart). David L. Quaid did the very fine cinematography; Michael Small composed the light, inoffensive score. ** from ****

To some who were either in soggy diapers or not even born, this movie lacks. However, getting out of the draft was a daily affair back in 1970. Even the most staunch supporters of "The War" admitted that Viet Nam or "Nam" was a one way ticket to mud, blood and gore.The direct method was to go to Canada which left some friends? and neighbors spitting mad. Having a child (no matter how or where) was VERY acceptable. The prevailing public feeling was that the chances of returning in one piece from 'Nam was not good. Many of the people that were very directly affected by Viet Nam, during that time period, were a mess. Their actions seemed disjointed and their lives lacked many of the characteristics of what we now call normal living. It was a time of such uncertainty, and day to day confrontations that life is fragile and gone too quickly. This movie, in part, represents that time in a story form.

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.

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.

One of the oddest Golden Globe nominations ever was Marlo Thomas for her movie debut as outstanding newcomer, something she must have found either amusing or just plain weird, having been as big a TV star in the late 60's as Mary Tyler Moore and Diahann Carroll. Her movie debut is this quiet drama (almost too quiet outside of Alan Alda's sudden laughing fit and character buts by Charlotte Rae and Florence Stanley), playing a young unmarried pregnant woman who finds someone (Alda) willing to marry her (so he can avoid being drafted into Vietnam, giving this a subtle anti-establishment theme), and how they eventually fall in love. Certainly she's a woman deserving to have been loved by the father of her child, and there's little about him dealt with here. Independent film maker Alda and Thomas meet accidentally while he's filming bag lady Rae collecting bottles to recycle, and they're soon spending time together as friends. She's a lover of old romantic films, so you get clips of her watching "A Place in the Sun" and "Footlight Parade", but the romance between Thomas and Alda isn't as memorable as Liz and Montgomery or Ruby and Dick. Good intentions don't always make good movies, and it's not the fault of the stars. The script and direction don't help in making this very interesting, so you have to hope for vintage New York City locations, which you get in very limited doses. Most of the film is set indoors which makes it come off as rather claustrophobic. While the tensions do rise, the issues that causes that are rather generic, and that makes this seem like something that could have been a decent TV drama, but not really cinematic. Of interest mainly to fans of the stars, but not a great representation of what the early 70's were all about.

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.