As talented and honest a performer as Jones was, one often feels there was something incomplete about her. As good as she may have been, she was probably never a truly great actress, but then her career took shape under less than favorable circumstances. The Hollywood she began working in was passing through the anticommunist witch hunts of HUAC and Joseph McCarthy. A broad effort was under way, with the direct consent and cooperation of many studio bosses and moguls, to implement the blacklist and to purge Hollywood of left-wing elements. What one could say, openly, after the witch hunts became limited.
The postwar period saw an economic boom and the US emerged as a superpower. New social moods were prevailing. An artist like Jones did not develop in a culture enriched by socialist or even a great deal of critical thought. And while she made a number of interesting films in the 1940s, Selznick kept a tight reign on Jones’s career. She worked with talented and important filmmakers like Lubitsch and Minnelli, but was never really afforded the opportunity to work in many films that challenged or explored the nature of the new postwar order with the depth that artists like Orson Welles or Fritz Lang were able to achieve. And by the late 1950s and the 1960s, it was certainly the case that talented performers would only find less and less meaningful works in which to practice their art. Jennifer Jones may never have developed as complete an artistic personality as she might have, but there were fewer opportunities open to her to do so than in a previous period.
Even as one considers the personal limitations of Jones and the limitations she had thrust on her by the conditions under which she worked, she nevertheless stands out as a talented and sincere performer. Her best work deserves to be remembered and revisited.
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