Watch Jennifer For Free

Just what I expected

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

****SPOILERS**** The 1st of 4 films that Howard Duff & his wife Ida Lupino were together in has to do with this spooky mansion that seems to be haunted by its former resident Jennifer Brown who vanished without a trace about a year ago. It's the place's new caretaker Agnes Langley, Ida Lupino,who ends up being victimized by the ghostly Jennifer in what her reasons are for her strange disappearance as well as what she had to do with a number of people including her former boss lawyer Irving Samson's untimely deaths. It's the fact of Samson killing himself when he found out that his clients money, that he kept in a wall safe, was stolen from right under his nose. Agnes suspected Jennifer stole it by finding a bank book hidden in the place with over $70,000.00 in it that was-she feels-the result of Samson paying her off in him being blackmailed by her.It's grocery store owner and live in tenant at the Brown Estate Jim Hollis, Howard Duff, who gets very friendly with Agnes in trying to keep her from cracking up in fear that Jennifer is or was a serial murderess who's still stalking the place and targeting her as her next victim. The local delivery boy Orlin Slade, Robert Nichols, doesn't help either feeding Agnas all these weird stories about Jennifer whom he feel is still in the house hiding in a closet or the basement and coming out at night terrorizing it's inhabitants.****SPOILERS**** Shock down to your socks final with Hollis revealing the truth about Jennifer that kept Agnes from flipping out and going stark raving mad. It's after Agnes recovered from her unfounded fears about Jennifer who as it turned went mad and ended up dying in a sanitarium that we see what seems to be Jennifer reappearing in shadow making Hollis' story about her death seem a bit phony. That's unless she's the ghost that Agnes always suspected that she is.

Ida Lupino hasn't "been well". She's just bundle of paranoid nerves quite frankly and arrives at the old empty mansion as caretaker. She immediately becomes obsessed with the prior caretaker, cousin Jennifer, who has disappeared. Ida hears noises..sounds..things that go bump in the night and then Howard Duff appears. He runs the village store selling scotch. Soon Ida's obsession with Jennifer gets spooky and all the time the background music with the high-pitched, Yoko Ono "wooo-wooo" screechy warbling and the record playing "vortex" doesn't help matters, but Duff perseveres and manages a smooch from Ida. Toss in the ever so slightly loony local college boy, Orin who fuels Ida's out-of-hand obsession and you have one flaky Ida. After much running in and out of the mansion, slamming doors, a terror in the basement boiler room, Duff calling for Ida, more annoying wooo-wooo soundtrack and a now fully hysterical Ida accusing Duff of murdering Jennifer, all thing come to a fully calm and serene ending except for the schmaltzy lingering shadow. Could that shadow be trying to tell us that even tho all's well that end's well, it isn't? Is Ida just as slightly if not more wacko-o than when she first arrived? This is a cheapo and you can tell, but what the heck---with nothing better to do, why not give it a shot?

In 1955 I took an entrance exam at Cambridge University, staying by myself in one of the old stone college buildings. One evening I went out to see a movie, which happened to be Jennifer. It's a classic creepy old house movie. Jennifer arrives to take over from the previous caretaker, who has mysteriously disappeared. She runs into a whole gamut of strange clues and spooky effects, pitched so you - and she -can't be sure if they are real or she's imagining them. Music and optical shock are used to great effect, with all the power that skillfully lit monochrome cinematography can deliver (considerable!!). At the end, she is reassured that it was all in her mind, and she's safe... till the very last shot, which opens up all the questions again, and still raises the hairs on my neck when I think of it. Going back to my room, I had to pass through a long set of dark cloisters - nearly didn't make it!! At least that's how it seemed back then. It would be great if the film were re-released on DVD, to see if its power persists today.

I first caught up with Jennifer years ago while out of town when it showed up on TV in the middle of the night; I fell asleep before it ended but it stuck with me until I had to track it down. Its appeal is that, though there's not a lot to it, it weaves an intriguing atmosphere, and because Ida Lupino and Howard Duff (real life man-and-wife at the time) display an alluring, low-key chemistry. Lupino plays a woman engaged to house-sit a vast California estate whose previous caretaker -- Jennifer -- up and disappeared. (Shades of Jack Nicholson in the Shining, although in this instance it's not Lupino who goes, or went, mad). Duff is the guy in town who manages the estate's finances and takes a shine to Lupino, who decides to play hard to get. She becomes more and more involved, not to say obsessed, with what happened to her predecessor in the old dark house full of descending stairways and locked cellars. The atmospherics and the romantic byplay are by far the best part of the movie, as viewers are likely to find the resolution a bit of a letdown -- there's just not that much to it (except a little frisson at the tail end that anticipates Brian De Palma's filmic codas). But it's well done, and, again, it sticks with you. Extra added attraction: this is the film that introduced the song "Angel Eyes," which would become part of the standard repertoire of Ol' Blue Eyes.