Jezebel

#20 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.

Pushed into production by Samuel Goldwyn to beat David O. Selznick to the screen in terms of adaptations of works about Southern belles in a Southern city who pines after a man she can’t have before a disaster strikes the city, Jezebel is the smaller, more dramatically focused version of Gone with the Wind, and we see the effects of a story where Scarlet O’Hara was so unredeemable as to be completely repellant. Buoyed by Bette Davis’ very strong central performance and William Wyler’s incredible visual sense, Jezebel is, much like Dead End, a respectable but minor work from a director who seems to have become slightly lost in the star system (he did marry a couple of them, as well as having an affair with Davis).

Miss Julie (Davis) is a controversial young lady in the upper crust of New Orleans society in the early 1850s. Her reputation is so on the edges of acceptability that men speak of her in unkindly terms at drinking establishments, leading to Buck Cantrell (George Brent) and her soon to be brother-in-law Ted (Richard Cromwell) to challenge some wagging tongue to a duel for her honor. Julie is due to marry the young, ambitious banker Preston (Henry Fonda) who is trying to convince the old boys club in works among to fund railroads to the West, which the northern cities are already funding and getting the benefit from. Julie, much like Scarlett O’Hara, is a self-obsessed woman who delights in dangling men on her fingers, though she’s much less dainty. She rides her horse, trying to teach it a lesson when it bucks, and walks right into her own party without changing. Such scandal!

The big event of the first half is a large ball that Julie decides to make a show of. Instead of showing up in the customary white dress of an unmarried woman, she purchases a gaudy red dress to draw attention to herself. No one is on her side on this matter, including Preston, who try to talk her out of it, but she will not be talked out of it. Preston decides to make it a lesson or her and takes her, despite Julie’s clandestine effort to get Buck to take her when she thinks no one else will support her (his sense of decorum is too great to subject her to that, though the whole idea tickles him). The ball becomes an embarrassment for Julie as her flaunting of convention makes her a pariah, but Preston leans into it, making her take in every moment and denying her ability to run from it.

Because of this scene, I find it very odd that Jezebel was filmed in black and white. So much is made of this red dress, and it looks black. It’s easy to imagine what technicolor would have done with the scene, though it very easily could have been a commercial or legal reason why it wasn’t used (Technicolor cameras were very expensive and very big, and the contracts gave extremely limited control to directors who had to give in to the whims of Technicolor consultants on set, so it’s easy to see how Wyler himself might have said no). Still, with so much made of the color of the dress, only seeing it as black as a member of the audience is weird.

Preston leaves Julie and New Orleans to go north, only coming back a year later with a wife, Amy (Margaret Lindsay), in tow, much to the chagrin of Julie. It’s also about this time that a yellow fever epidemic begins hitting New Orleans, forcing the upper crust of society to congregate in their plantation estates outside of the city, bringing the entire social circle to live for a time in Halcyon Estates, Julie’s family’s property. It’s here where Julie reveals herself to be just thoroughly awful. She intentionally antagonizes Preston directly and by using conversation to turn Buck against him as well as Amy by preying on Buck’s own anti-northern prejudices, especially when Preston says that the South doesn’t have enough industrial might to counter the North in a potential conflict. She’s trying to hurt Preston and even drive a wedge between Preston and Amy.

The turning point is supposed to be the moment when Preston contracts yellow fever in the city, and she sneaks in to care for him. Except, it’s what she would do anyway if she were trying to steal him from Amy. In fact, when the rest of the party do show up later, the look on Julie’s face is one of guilt. That’s exactly what she was trying to do, and when the family friend Dr. Livingstone (Donald Crisp) reveals that he’s reported Preston’s illness to the authorities, an act that will lead Preston to being shipped off to a leper colony with the rest of the confirmed cases, Julie’s look in her face is one of a conniving woman who knows she’s found her way to be with the man she loves in place of the woman he loves. She gives a speech to Amy about how Julie is the stronger of the two and will be the one able to protect him the best, acknowledging that Preston doesn’t love Julie but Amy, but if this is supposed to be some kind of earnest change of heart, I think it falls flat. Julie has spent the entire movie flaunting convention no matter what the cost to her, only choosing to retreat from the world when rebuked, never to change her ways. And suddenly we’re supposed to believe she changes?

I bring this up because the movie is obviously a melodrama and there does seem to be some effort to make the audience believe that Julie is dedicated to being a better woman, but after 100 minutes of her being awful all around, the final four minutes of her suddenly change me don’t convince me. I think she’s lying, that she knows she’s lying, and that she knows she stealing a husband from a loving wife. Can this be a great film with such an unlikeable character at its center? I think so, but the ending really does seem built on the assumption that her change is genuine. That I don’t believe it blunts the impact.

That being said, much like Dead End, this is Wyler using every ounce of his talent (this time with Ernest Haller as his cinematographer) to make the action on screen look great. The highlight is the ball with the rest of the dance falling to the side to let Preston and Julie be on their own as the center of attention. However, Wyler’s subtly complex visual framing is evident from beginning to end with these random shots of six people, all at different distances from the camera, placed completely naturally, and all within view of the camera so we can see all of their faces. His precision visually makes the film, all of his films, really, simply delightful to just look at.

And something must be said of the performances. Bette Davis is someone I’ve never quite gotten the cult around, but it’s easy to admit that she was a very fine actress. She very convincingly makes Julie into a Jezebel, a completely unrepentant and shamelessly vicious monster of a young lady to the point where I fully buy her as that and nothing else. I think you could easily blame the ending’s blunted impact on her and her performance. The cast around her is just as good with Fonda offering essentially the straight-man to Davis’ monster. I also always enjoy the presence of Donald Crisp, that fatherly character actor who was one of the main joys of John Ford‘s How Green Was My Valley.

So, I see Jezebel and Dead End in a similar light. They’re largely actor focused films with extremely great visual designs that work well enough to entertain but end up feeling light and disconnected. I can easily imagine in lesser hands than Wyler both of them kind of just falling apart, but Wyler kept them together and created solid entertainments out of them both.

Rating: 3/4