Background
Jean Negulesco was born on 26 February 1903 Craiova, Dolj, Romania.
Jean Negulesco was born on 26 February 1903 Craiova, Dolj, Romania.
Attended Carol I High School.
Andrew Sarris has argued that the watershed in Negulesco s career was GinemaScope, Fox’s ploy to defeat TV. Certainly those late women’s pics are the less intimate for being stretched out over a wider frame. But the real turning point for Negulesco seems a matter of where he was employed. For in 1948, he moved from Warners to Fox, and thus lost the chance to continue the romantic treatment of “hard” people, and gave himself up to the sentimental view of coziness. Different studios perpetrated different attitudes to the world. Warners learned from the success of Casablanca, in 1943, which emphasizes narrative pace and density—an old hallmark of the gangster pictures—low-key black-and-white photography, and the glamour of cynical, worldly people exchanging offhand, knowing dialogue—Bogart hunched up in the dark, urging Sam to play it again. Negulesco bloomed in that Indian summer: The Mask of Dimitrios, from the Eric Ambler thriller, is Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre; The Conspirators is Hedy Lamarr, Paul Henreid, and Greenstreet; Nobody Lives Forever is John Garfield; Three Strangers is Lorre, Greenstreet, and Geraldine Fitzgerald; Humoresque is a fine Jerry Wald women's picture, with Joan Crawford and Garfield; Deep Valley is Ida Lupino. In most of them, there is an entrancing, velvety quality of dream world brought to life. The timing, mood, and nuance are as precise as in Casablanca, and Negulesco seems as assured a director as Michael Curtiz.
There is an exception to this, just as his first Fox film was untypical of that studio. Johnny Belinda (at Warners) and Road House (at Fox) are in curiously opposite comers. The first is Jane Wyman as a deaf and mute girl, raped but loved. Its characters are rural, one-dimensional, and blatant, quite unlike the eccentric, independent sophistication of the Warners films, or of Road House, which has Widmark and Lupino again, as a sultry chanteuse stilling a provincial audience with her laconic delivery of moody songs. It speaks of the aplomb of the lady, and the harking back to dark cabarets, that she made Widmark seem young.
But Fox soon dragged Negulesco down, more through the intrinsic sentimentality of the story department than the devitalizing elements of wide screen and De Luxe Color, surely the least happy process for a world of supposedly intense daydream. How to Marry a Millionaire is good Monroe, with a nice airplane meeting with David Wayne, and Three Coins in the Fountain was very big at the box office. Otherwise, Negulesco illustrates the power of the studios over minor talents.
Anyone coming upon Negulesco in the early 1950s could be forgiven for associating him with trashy, sentimental novelettes. By the end of that decade, even the titles of his movies screeched out a warning of bogus romantic comfort foisted on enervated melodramatic plots: The Giß of Love, A Certain Smile, Count Your Blessings, The Best of Everything. That era represents the worst of cinema, when production schedules had not shrunk to the new, smaller audience or begun to aspire to its higher standards. For a few years, major studios still churned out a pale version of their blithe past. Nowhere was the pallor more gruesome than at Twentieth Century-Fox.