NFR Project: 'Jezebel' (1938)

 

NFR Project: ‘Jezebel’

Dir: William Wyler

Scr: Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, John Huston

Pho: Ernest Haller

Ed: Warren Low

Premiere: March 10, 1938

103 min.

On the National Film Registry there are not only one but two excellent essays analyzing this film – one by Gabriel Miller, which you can read here, and one by Cary O’Dell, which you can read here.

I have little to add. This film was crafted for Bette Davis, who had just lost out on winning the role of Scarlett O’Hara in the looming production of Gone with the Wind. After winning Best Actress Oscar in 1935 for Dangerous, she was ready and eager to play a leading role in an A-list film. This film, with its similar themes and historical period, was released one year before Wind.

Movie starlets of the day were best known for their beautiful appearances and pleasant dispositions. Women’s roles in film were routinely slotted into the stereotypes of victim, temptress, or mother figure. It was Davis’ outstanding performance as the hard-bitten, terminally ill waitress in Of Human Bondage in 1934 that broke open the idea that actresses could play complex or, God forbid, negative characters. Davis’ broad range meant that she could be trusted with tackling challenging roles.

The film opens in New Orleans, 1852. Headstrong Southern belle Julie Marsden (Davis) acts without a care for what other people think, giving her a scandalous reputation. She is engaged to banker Pres Dillon (Henry Fonda just before his definitive role as Tom Joad in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath), who desires nothing more than that she conform to social niceties. When she chooses to wear a red gown to a ball (unmarried women were expected to wear white), she shocks her fiancée and everyone else in society and is ostracized. Dillon breaks their engagement.

Julie sulks, then learns Pres is coming back after a year in the North. She prepares to capture his heart again, certain that he will forgive her, even donning the white dress she spurned a year earlier. She is devastated to find that Pres has married. She maintains a crusty courtesy towards the new couple, but soon schemes to have Pres get into a duel with another admirer, the pugnacious Buck Cantrell (George Brent). Her plans go awry and Buck is killed.

Then Pres comes down with yellow fever, which is decimating the region. Julie brings him to her home, tends him – and then volunteers to accompany him to Lazaret Island, where all dying of the plague were sent to die. This final act of self-sacrifice redeems her.

Davis was fearless. Though beautiful, she had no problem displaying ugly traits, which she is called upon to do in Jezebel. Wyler was an outstanding director, winner of three Best Director Oscars, who churned out hit after hit from the ‘30s through the ‘50s. He was capable of bringing out outstanding performances from his performers, and he guided Davis to another Best Actress Oscar for her role in this film. Wyler’s camera stays on Davis’ face repeatedly throughout the film, letting emotions and thoughts register in her subtly changing features. In one scene, she moves from glee to shock to despair and then acceptance, all without saying nary a word.

The film is sometimes viewed as a proto-feminist statement, as Julie pushes against the arbitrary social boundaries that hem her in as a woman. Still, she is acting in reaction to society, not freeing herself from it. She wants respectability and acceptance – on her own terms. And indeed, at film’s end she is supposedly redeemed by her self-sacrifice, she has recast herself as a martyr. As in many of the films of the period, the woman who rebels is marked for death.

Too, the film is ambivalent about the society Julie is raised in. Southern culture is portrayed as genteel and refined, but it is also obviously built on the back of slave labor (we see lots of happy “pickanninies” who sing and dance with childish enthusiasm – look close and you will see African American actors Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Matthew “Stymie” Beard, the latter of Little Rascals fame, as obsequious servants). The painful depiction of simple-minded Black people is painful to behold.

There is some talk of the impending civil contest over slavery, and the Southerners are presented as essentially wrong-headed about the South’s superiority and durability. Julie is obviously in conflict with a society that we as viewers know is doomed. The progressivism and industrial might of the North will lead to its eventual victory over the self-assured sons of the South.

O’Dell in particular points out Wyler’s use of elements in repetition (Julie’s dresses, fire imagery) to advance the story. The director was unique in that he could find visual cues to undergird and reinforce the points her was trying to make. Wyler and Davis would work together again, earning her two more Oscars in the process.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Love Finds Andy Hardy.