So farewell then Jennifer Jones

Jennifer Jones, star of the greatest film ever made in Shropshire, has died at the age of 90. Her obituary is in the Daily Telegraph.

The photograph above (borrowed from the marvellous Powell & Pressburger tribute site) shows her as Hazel Woodus in the 1950 film Gone to Earth. It was based on a novel by the Shropshire novelist Mary Webb and shot in some of the places where she set the book.

All of which makes me rather embarrassed that I once wrote on the New Statesman website:

it has put me in mind of Gone to Earth – the film that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger shot round here from the book by the Shropshire novelist Mary Webb.

In it the heroine, played by Jennifer Jones, is torn between David Farrar's hard-riding squire and Cyril Cusack's sexless minister. It is rather like Tess of the D'Urbervilles with more interesting geology.

Jones’s character Hazel Woodus is a half-wild child of nature given to skipping barefoot over the hills and consulting the book of charms left her by her gypsy mother. When she weds Cusack, she takes her tame fox up the aisle with her on a lead. Later, in an attempt to save the creature from Farrar's hounds, she plunges down a mineshaft with it in her arms.

The general opinion locally was that it served her right.