Watch It:  Wednesday, September 28, 2011 (5pm, PT or 8pm, ET)

Joan Fontaine’s best roles are as heroines with unreliable lovers. In REBECCA (1940), she marries Laurence Olivier before finding out that he’s covering up his part in the death of his first wife. In SUSPICION (1941), husband Cary Grant may very well be trying to kill her.  In JANE EYRE (1943), her sardonic employer and true love Orson Welles is secreting his insane wife upstairs.  And in LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948), she’s in love with playboy Louis Jourdan who doesn’t remember her nor does he realize that he’s fathered a child with her.  Though the love stories are twisted, Fontaine usually emerges as a bright-eyed lass of fervent yearning and pure-hearted devotion. 

On September 28, TCM will be showing Fontaine’s rarely-screened film, THE CONSTANT NYMPH (1943).  It’s one of those movies that has copyright and legal issues behind the scenes, making it a huge disappointment for fans clamoring to see Fontaine in her third Oscar-nominated performance.  NYMPH is based on the novel by Margaret Kennedy and was previously adapted to the big screen in 1928 and 1933.  It’s about a 14-year-old girl named Tessa who falls for a composer.  The composer in the 1943 version is played by Charles Boyer who made a successful career as unreliable lovers in classics like ALGIERS (1938) and GASLIGHT (1944).  Boyer treats Tessa (Fontaine) as a favorite mascot or kid sister, as he should, considering Tessa’s age.  But he is the romantic figure of Tessa’s heart and will thwart her love, unknowingly, by marrying someone else.

THE CONSTANT NYMPH shares a good bit with Fontaine’s other seldom-screened film (at least in the U.S.), LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN.  She plays girls in both films, dressed in braids and form-obscuring dresses.  The characterization might easily seem embarrassingly comedic as it purposely is for Ginger Rogers in THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR (1942).  In that film, Rogers masquerades as a 12-year-old, with a pouty voice and balloon in hand, to qualify for a reduced train ticket.  It’s not at all about representing the girl at heart. 

Joan Fontaine’s winsome portrayals, however, are more akin to those of Mary Pickford who famously played spirited youngsters in such films as THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL (1917), STELLA MARIS (1918), DADDY-LONG-LEGS (1919), and even LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY (1921).  In seeing Fontaine and Pickford as children, we are inclined to side with them because they are unaffected and free of all the artifices of womanhood with its makeup, seductive wardrobes, and overt sexuality.  A love that is born in a girl’s heart and maintained over the test of time and hardship is valued as premium emotion over the racy passions of a society woman.  In NYMPH, Alexis Smith plays the fashionable femme who captures Boyer’s heart, thus leaving Fontaine to love in secret.

Fontaine’s chemistry with her leading men doesn’t drive the success of her performances.  Her talent is in making you believe how love infuses her existence.  It throbs in her veins and compels her to stand in the line of fire, even as her lovers disappoint her. 

In LETTER and NYMPH, love is crippled by health issues.  Fontaine only reveals the truth to her lover in LETTER, when she is stricken with typhus.  And in NYMPH, Tessa suffers from a heart condition, the seriousness of which she attempts to conceal, along with her feelings for Boyer.  By the end of the film, even I had heart palpitations!  

Romantic melodrama doesn’t have to be as epic in history or as visually sweeping as GONE WITH THE WIND.  THE CONSTANT NYMPH quickens the heart and stirs the soul by earnestly appealing to that memory or that yearning for someone unspoiled and unconditionally luminous, guiding us to the best versions of ourselves.  Of course, the dramatic hitch is timing, and, here, it gets a killer treatment, memorably and deftly orchestrated to leave Fontaine, Boyer, and the audience all aflutter.

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Related Blog Postings:

•  “Star Quality: Joan Fontaine”, October 24, 2008

http://open.salon.com/blog/katharine_yee/2008/10/23/star_quality_joan_fontaine

• “Letter From An Unknown Woman”, March 25, 2010

http://open.salon.com/blog/katharine_yee/2010/03/25/tcm_allert_letter_from_an_unknown_woman