Jennifer Jones received her first Oscar nomination and won the Oscar for playing Bernadette Soubirous in The Song Of Bernadette. Bernadette is a young woman who sees a vision of the Virgin Mary which results in her becoming the subject of worship, ridicule, and religious persecution only to come out almost completely unfazed.
Jennifer Jones appeared to have been For Whom The Bell Tolls's star Ingrid Bergman's main competition for Best Actress in 1943 with the latter being expected to triumph but given the strength of The Song Of Bernadette with the Academy (it got twelve Oscar nominations!) and Jones's Golden Globe win I wouldn't call her win an upset but hey I wasn't there so I couldn't tell you for sure :)
The Song Of Bernadette is a very admirable film although overly long and somewhat uncomfortable to watch. It is truly an awful and abhorrent thing to witness the town government conspire to destroy Bernadette's life as well as her borderline emotionally abusive parents trying to squash her faith. I also think it spends too much time on the conspirator's storyline; we get their motivations and their personalities right from the start so why do we have to spend so much time on them? Still the script is very strong, the acting also excellent, and its beautifully made in addition to being a highly engaging story.
Bernadette is another very interesting character from this category and arguably one of the most challenging. Bernadette needs to come across as sincere, steadfast, sweet, shy, strong, but polite and never terse. Playing someone with such unusual religious faith and devotion is tricky to get right but Jennifer Jones is able to do the trick. She imbues the character of Bernadette with a wonderful purity and innocence without making the character too sweet or saccharine. Jones adds such dignity, strength, and quiet fervor to her character that it makes it beautiful to watch as well as captivating as she is so beautiful that she lights up the screen. Bernadette is so wonderfully honest, innocent, sweet, and subtly strong that you don't wonder why so many people put their faith, their reputations, and their belief in her hands. As the film nears its end, Jones makes us feel her character's intense emotional struggle to leave her home and the possibility of a happy love life behind due to her knowing that she has been chosen by God as a vessel of wonder and faith meaning that she must leave her life behind and become a nun. The one issue with the performance is that it is a bit one note due to the nature of her character(therefore that is the point) but the last 45 minutes or so gives Jones more opportunities to portray different sides of Bernadette such as her genuine feelings of pity and compassion that she has for Sister Vazous's jealousy of her gifts, her pain as she begins to waste away on illness, her anger towards the men that continue to harass her about her faith. and her near loss of faith when she is on the brink of death. These scenes should have been a lesson to the filmmakers to cut some of the corrupt politician scenes and expand Bernadette's character a little more but Jones is still terrific.
It's a very captivating, strongly played, and luminous performance that is the center of the film.
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