Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo; Dressed to Kill) was famously beautiful, and a defining example of the “sexpot” archetype of Hollywood movie star in mid-century cinema. She was beautiful, and men loved looking at her butt and bust. That’s basically what Jessica (1961) is about. Debuting at the beginning of the end of the Hays Code era, the film was daring enough to be about sex, but includes none. But it does find the daring to cut to shots of Dickinson’s butt riding on a scooter several times. The film is about infidelity in marriage, but no infidelity occurs, depending on your definition. It is about the dignity and independence of women, especially beautiful women, but it is also a celebration of the way Angie Dickinson cannot help but be objectified by the world around her. And she knows it.
Angie Dickinson as Jessica Brown Visconti in Jean Negulesco’s 1961 screwball comedy JESSICA. Image courtesy of Via Vision and Imprint Films.
Based on the novel The Midwife of Pont Clery (1954) by Flora Sandstrom, Jessica opens on Maruice Chevalier (Gigi; Love in the Afternoon) as a singing priest, the moral guardian of the town of Forza d’Agró. The balance of this quiet corner of the world has recently been upended by the arrival of a new, American midwife, Angie Dickinson’s titular Jessica. What has she done that’s so wrong? She’s too hot and too good at her job. The amount of lovemaking in the town has gone up, but the women can tell their husbands are thinking of her, not them, during sex. And then she has the audacity to seek to deliver the consequences. She dates no one, greets everyone, and bounces up and down around town on a moped. The women hatch a plot, a sex strike, to protest her presence in the town, blaming her and not their husbands’ wandering eyes. The film is a tad retrograde but incredibly charming in the way that many films that come up short of their ideal can be. There are nuggets of meaning stifled by the context of its time, jokes about abuse that don’t play anymore, and ahead-of-its-time appraisal of the church. A horny classic about Angie Dickinson being the most perfect woman in the world, but not a perfect film.
“One of nature’s more formidable accidents.”
The fun of the film is derived from its wonderful ensemble cast, with character actors like Noël-Noël (Return to Life) getting the chance to show off, and Sylvia Kiscina (Juliet of the Spirits; Lisa and the Devil) and Marina Berti (Ben-Hur; Quo Vadis) and Rossana Roy (L’eclisse; Big Deal on Madonna Street) playing the incredibly gorgeous but jealous women of the town. Chevalier’s Father Antonio steals the show, manipulating the townsfolk, parleying between the many parties of the conflict, consoling Jessica, consulting the striking women, and preaching to the men. He leads several diegetic musical numbers, serving as narrator to us and master of ceremonies for the town. One of them with the whole town is particularly earnest, charming, and endearing. Chevalier is also where the finest-aged segment of the drama comes from. At one point, desperate to resolve the conflict, he tries to bully the women from his pulpit, twisting Ephesians 5: 22-23, which reads:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. (NIV)
“I cannot blame the men. Actually father, you can.”
The film paints this twisting of the verse, which, in the context of all of Ephesians, is about mutual love and humility in marriage, as silly and misogynistic. Which it is. It’s also a twisting that persists in Evangelical churches today. It’s a horrible, evil infection in the Christian Church that lays at the heart of papal abuse cases like the SBC Scandal. So it’s refreshing to see a screwball comedy from the ‘60s poking fun at this horrible lie, reminding us that this struggle isn’t new. That’s not the only place the film is ahead of the curve. One of the most tiring tropes in Hollywood, highlighted this year with Netflix’s disastrous release of The Uglies (2024), is when the supposedly homely, average, or ugly supporting cast of a beautiful movie star is as or more beautiful than they are. The film knows that Koscina and Berti are absurdly beautiful women just like Dickinson, and, strengthened by the power of subjective beauty, tackles the trope head on.
What the film doesn’t know how to tackle is the romantic B-plot. Its romantic plot line with Gabrielle Ferzetti (Once Upon a Time in the West; L’avvertura) is a hard sell, with contrived drama and motivations that stem from romantic fantasy, but not character or genre. His loner-rich-man antifaschist is a sketch of a character, and Jessica’s mistaken belief, and preference, that he be an unremarkable fisherman comes out of nowhere. There’s a better film in here held back by this plot line.
Angie Dickinson as Jessica Brown Visconti in Jean Negulesco’s 1961 screwball comedy JESSICA. Image courtesy of Via Vision and Imprint Films.
Imprint has done a great job with the transfer once again, but just throwing it on might make you second guess it when you see the out of focus opening. While the opening titles are soft enough to cause worry, the rest of the film proves to be as sharp as a knife. The soft look of the film transfer in the opening is simply a consequence of the film’s original matte layers. If there’s anything of value in the filmmaking, it’s the color. The film looks beautiful, but not as beautiful as Angie Dickinson, and that’s all that really matters here.
Jessica Special Features:
- 1080 p High-definition presentation on Blu-ray from a new 2K scan of the original camera negative by Imprint Films
- *NEW* Audio Commentary by screenwriter/film historian C. Courtney Joyner (2024)
- “Angie Dickinson: Looking Back” – In depth interview with actress Angie Dickinson
- Audio English LPCM 2.0 Mono
- Original Aspect Ratio 2.35:1
- Optional English HOH Subtitles
- Limited Edition Slipcase
Available on Blu-ray August 28th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Imprint Films Jessica webpage.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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