A struggling painter (Joseph Cotten) meets a precocious child (Jennifer Jones) in the park and becomes inspired to paint her. Curiously, each time he meets her, whether it's weeks or months, she becomes noticeably older by several years. This sort of loopy mystical fantasy material practically begs to be laughed at yet somehow as nonsensical as the whole thing is, it holds your interest and you don't laugh. Which doesn't mean it's any good, just that its film makers (producer David O. Selznick, director William Dieterle) are skilled enough to make us take the whole enterprise as seriously as intended (more or less). The film's prologue sets us up with with psychobabble about infinity and truth and quotes from Euripides and Keats before plunging into the other worldly romance. Surprisingly, Jones is relatively convincing in each aspect of her aging though Cotten appears as dour in the romantic sequences as he was at the film's beginning. Curiously, for the film's big finish, a raging storm, the film goes from B&W to green then red tints. Dimitri Tiomkin adapts the music of Claude Debussy for his score while Bernard Herrmann wrote the melody for Jones's haunting song. Based on the novel by Robert Nathan. With Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, David Wayne, Anne Francis, Nancy Olson, Florence Bates, Albert Sharpe and Cecil Kellaway.
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