Jenny (1962 film)


Jenny is a 1962 Australian TV drama.
Australian TV drama was relatively rare at the time.

Plot

Jenny is a 16 year old girl whose father, an actor, and mother, a television personality, have been separated for 15 months. The mother tells Jenny she has met a Melbourne businessman that the mother wants to marry. This sends Jenny out looking for her father and boyfriend. She winds up at a party at Kings Cross, and is seduced. She gets a cab driver to take her to The Gap where she intends on committing suicide. However the cab driver talks her out of it and takes Jenny home to her father.

Cast

The play appears to be based on a stage play written by Kerr called Hunger of a Girl. This was set in the Blue Mountains and was about a 17 year old girl whose parents are separated and who reacts badly when her mother falls for another man. It results in the girl killing the other man.
This play was sponsored by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and produced by the North Sydney Independent in September 1960 with Leonard Teale and Joan Winchester.
The Sydney Morning Herald called the play "commendably smooth" but felt it became contrived in the second act.

Production

It was the first of a series of six Australian plays to be produced by the ABC in 1962. The other five were:
A critic from the Sunday Sydney Morning Herald called it "first rate drama" until the last five minutes when "it collapsed into nothingness" because it left unanswered the central question, namely "Should the partners of an unsuccessful marriage forgo their own chances of happiness for the sake of their children?... Did author Kerr simply throw up his hands and give the whole thing away?"
The critic from the Sydney Morning Herald said "the play had all the searing truth and genuine emotion of a piece of eminently marketable woman's magazine fiction."