tomsview "Tender is the Night" seemed to be the sort of film Jennifer Jones should not have been making at that time in her career. She was a woman who had emotional problems that seemed uncomfortably close to the problems her character in the film experienced.The film is based on what is considered F. Scott Fitzgerald's most autobiographical novel. According to some sources, Jennifer Jones' character, Nicole Diver, was based on Fitzgerald's marriage to a highly-strung woman who suffered from severe psychological disorders.Like Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises", the film is set among expatriate Americans in Europe in the 1920's. Nicole (Jennifer Jones) is married to psychiatrist Dick Diver (Jason Robards). They are financially well off and their life revolves around serious partying. They even have a resident, alcoholic, piano playing composer, Abe North, played by Tom Ewell, who is frustrated at having a great melody stuck in his system.We learn through flashback that Nicole had been Dick's patient and there is concern that she may not really be cured and that Dick himself may have issues. Infidelity lurks in every corner, especially when a young starlet takes a fancy to Dick. Eventually Nicole and Dick drift apart as Dick heads deeper into alcoholism (as did Fitzgerald).Jennifer Jones still exuded that amazing aura and fits the part well; too well if one is aware of her story.Cary Grant was considered for the part of Dick Diver, but it finally went to Jason Robards. Although he was a brilliant stage and character actor, Robards didn't project the charisma of a Cary Grant, and maybe that's what was needed.Although the final scenes do pack a punch, for the most part the film seems dry and talky.There is location work in Switzerland and France with brilliant scenes at the end shot on the French Riviera, but much of the interior studio work is flat and uninspired. Also, Bernard Herrmann's score doesn't marry with the fabric of the film the way his scores did for "Vertigo", "North By Northwest" and many others.The actors are photographed mainly at the middle distance with few close-ups. Possibly Selznick forbade closing in on Jennifer Jones who was about 43 at the time. She looked fabulous though with a tightly bobbed hairstyle.Big and glossy, the film is interesting more for the behind-the-scenes story, but for Jennifer Jones fans, she is still a good reason to seek it out.

Edgar Soberon Torchia 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.

briantaves TENDER IS THE NIGHT is best appreciated less as an adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel than as an original work. At the time it was made, 1962, many of Fitzgerald's themes were still considered beyond what would be allowed on the screen. Instead, producer David O. Selznick sought a vehicle to showcase his wife, actress Jennifer Jones, and other stars were cast who were not ideal representations of the characters Fitzgerald had imagined. Veteran director Henry King, whose career dated back to the 1910s, had a long tenure as the leading house director at Twentieth Century-Fox. With this film King for the first time had a producer who attempted to dictate how shooting should be done, and he and Selznick clashed. The resulting long film satisfied neither man, and it was the last film of both.Nonetheless, TENDER IS THE NIGHT, in its own right, memorably depicts the crumbling of a talented man of promising future, played by Jason Robards as therapist to wealthy Jones in a sanitarium. Against his better judgment, the two fall in love and he agrees to marry her, despite the breach of professional standards. Over the course of their marriage, Robards loses his intellectual drive and becomes increasingly dependent on Jones, who, although she had begun desperately needing his guidance and love, gradually transforms. Jones becomes a strong, independent woman, and ultimately leaves behind the man who began as her mentor but who has lost the very qualities which attracted her to him. Yet Jones's full recovery from sanitarium to be capable of life on her own is a result of the same marriage that proved disastrous for Robards, and the complex, shifting nature of power and ambition in their union, and its personal outcome, provides an absorbing, cautionary romantic parable.

Neil Doyle Neither F. Scott Fitzgerald nor Ernest Hemingway ever have much luck in having their novels transferred to the screen with any degree of success. 'Tender in the Night' suffers from several things: the casting of leads (Jennifer Jones, Jason Robards, Jr.) and a weak script that never manages to make us believe the story's tragic overtones. And at 146 minutes, the film is rambling and overlong.Jennifer Jones is alienating in the principal feminine role as a neurotic and never manages to make us feel any sympathy for her character. Jason Robards, Jr. is physically miscast as Dick Diver and does not add to his reputation as a fine actor. Jones gives an odd, uneven performance with critics claiming that age was one of the factors for her failure to be convincing in the role--although Time magazine was impressed enough to give her a rather left-handed compliment: "She is well cast as a neurotic and does her best work in a decade." But the majority of critics were not favorably impressed.Whatever, the film did not reinforce her prestige as a box-office star as Selznick hoped. Joan Fontaine does fairly well as a sophisticated woman in a rather peripheral role that does not warrant star billing.And oddly enough, despite some lush location photography, everything about the "look" of the film seems artificial and stage bound. This artificial streak runs through the script too.