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Description
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alternate German language version of Jenny (1958) shot at the same time with German actors (directed by Alfred Bittins) and released a year later. All these versions center on Jenny (directors daughter Ellen van Hemert), an 18 year old who gets pregnant during her busy training schedule for the rowing contest. Her boyfriend Ed (Maxim Hamel) fancies himself rather a swinging jet-setter and is therefor quite unprepared for fatherhood. Ah, there's the rub. To make matters worse, Jenny's only relative, her father (Ko van Dijk) is always to busy thinking about her acting career to notice his daughter's woes. Luckily she finds help from two unexpected sources: a friendly doctor friend of Ed's (Peter Brusse) and her stern rowing coach Greet (Andrea Domburg). The latter being modeled after real life rowing coach Greet Dusseldorf.
"Jenny" would nowadays be called a chick-flick. It is difficult to imagine any man willingly putting bum on seat for this film in 1958, although there are a surprising amount of shower scenes featuring Jenny's teammates (or course they all wear swimming suits in the shower cubicles). Critics weren't kind to Jenny, saying that the Dutch films in general couldn't compete with Bert Haanstra's documentary features that were all the rage at the time. Even director Van Hemert saw the project as a stepping stone to get over with so he could go on to do his own projects. Unfortunately for him, his production partner Jan Kemps died shortly after both Jenny's were completed and this never happened. Van Hemert subsequently made the jump to television, where he became quite renowned, but never got to helm another feature film. ( Chip_douglas, IMDb.)
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