Cinema: A Fatal Desire to Please

Tender Is the Night (20th Century-Fox) is a good movie that had every reason to be bad. The novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald on which the film is based is a miracle of literary chic; it reads as if written in expensive perfume on the stationery of the Ritz. But literary style can’t be photographed, and in other respects the novel is sort of a mess. The plot is often gappy and sometimes sappy; the characters are superficially silly and fundamentally unreal. The intellectual apparatus of the tale—a compendium of cocktail party chatter about psychiatry—is almost pathetic. What’s more, in the film the 18-to-29-year-old heroine is played by 42-year-old Jennifer Jones.

These briars, however, have been pruned —or leaped—with resolute skill by a gifted scenarist, Ivan Moffat (Giant), and an astute director, Henry King (The Sun Also Rises). King faced his biggest problem in Actress Jones, and the problem wasn’t only age: in recent films the lady has limited her expressions largely to a toneless hysterical laugh and an alarmingly sick tic. But in Night she is well cast as a neurotic, and does her best work in a decade. Moffat for his part firmed up and rounded out the novel’s plot and people, and he has diluted Old Fitzgerald with a spritz of psychiatric competence. What emerges in his script with simple clarity is what is true and beautiful in the book: the story, essentially Fitzgerald’s own, of a man who makes the always-fatal mistake of pleasing a woman and forgetting to please himself.

The man is Dr. Richard Diver (Jason Robards Jr.), a young American psychiatrist, attached to a clinic in Zurich, who has committed an emotional breach of professional ethics: he has fallen in love with a patient named Nicole (Actress Jones), a charming American girl whose father has left her several million dollars and a psychosis—the aftermath of an incestuous episode. The head of the clinic (Paul Lukas) urgently warns Robards against the union: “A man cannot be both lover and psychiatrist to the same woman. You cannot be an impossible image of perfection, a god. and a husband too. When she discovers she has married a fallible human being—disaster. Maybe for you too. You start by living life her way. Then slowly you learn to like it. Beware the tyranny of the weak, the tyranny of the sick.”

The young doctor tries to use his better judgment, but one night . . . and one night leads to another. They go south on a honeymoon that imperceptibly enlarges through the ’20s like a tapeworm steadily devouring the doctor’s morale as a man. She demands incessant attention; he gives it—partly for medical reasons, partly from husbandly affection, partly because he is too weak to resist: he has always had “a fatal desire to please.” He begins to neglect his work, live on her money, belabor the booze. The tabloids play him up as a “playboy psychiatrist.” And strangely, by a species of bloodless transfusion, she gets stronger as he gets weaker. In the end, she breaks her dependency, breaks the marriage, breaks his spirit. She goes on to another marriage. He goes back to a small town in upstate New York.

Like most Hollywood movies these days, Tender Is the Night is too long (2 hr. 26 min.). Like the book, it is too slick: the color work, for instance, is lovely, but at times Director King lets scenery overbear significance. But the sense persists that something serious is going on, thanks importantly to Actor Lukas, who gives a remarkably evocative imitation of the Wise Old Man of Zu rich, the late Carl Jung; thanks principally to Actor Robards. Robards has all the quick intelligence and liquid charm the author wrote into his hero, but he has something more. He has eyes that loom behind the easy smile and graceful chatter with a strangely disturbing expression, the expression of a dying man who sees quite clearly, as his whole life flashes before his eyes, that it was actually nothing, nothing at all.