Stars: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter
Director: William Wyler
Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actress-Bette Davis*, Supporting Actress-Fay Bainter*, Cinematography, Scoring)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Julie Marsden (Davis), a spoiled, beautiful young southern belle who at the beginning of the film is mad that her beau Preston Dillard (Fonda) won't come to her dress fitting. She decides to enact revenge on him by wearing a red dress to a local dance where all of the unmarried girls wear white, much to the chagrin of everyone around her, including her Aunt Belle (Bainter). Though Pres protests, she goes to the dance dressed in red, and quickly realizes the error of her ways when she's shunned by virtually everyone, and becomes a pariah. After this dance, Pres dumps her, and goes north. When he returns, she's ready to placate him, but he's already married to Amy (Margaret Lindsay), a northerner who feels like an outsider to Julie, and competition she must squash. She goes about this by dating Buck Cantrell (Brent), who is madly in love with her, and who consistently fights with Pres. This goes awry when Pres's brother (Richard Cromwell) challenges Buck to a duel, and in the process Buck dies. Later in the film, there is a pandemic breaking out, and soon Pres becomes infected. Julie wants to treat him, fighting with Amy, and eventually convincing her that Julie will be better for Pres, that Amy won't have the strength to fight for him the way she will. The film ends with Julie, defeated but ready to finally repay Pres for her slight, headed into an unknown future where they may well both die of the disease.
As I mentioned above, I had seen Jezebel, but it had been a really long time since I watched it; it was surely something I recorded off of AMC with a VHS tape when I was a child at the beginning of my Oscar-watching. I did remember it better than I expected, I will say, particularly the fuss over the red dress, Bainter's title character speech, and the defiant Davis headed off with a handsome, scruffy Hank Fonda into near-certain death. What I didn't recall, and quite frankly this might be because I hadn't seen it yet, was how similar it feels to Gone with the Wind. Jezebel the film preceded Gone with the Wind, and the play on which it is based preceded Margaret Mitchell's novel. But it's hard to watch this film & not think of it as a lesser chapter compared to the magnum opus, and not just because most movies feel dwarfed by Gone with the Wind, the Grand Teton of what Hollywood can do when everything goes for the widest possible angle.
After all, in Gone with the Wind there's a section where Scarlett also has to wear a red dress, albeit less of her own volition & more because she's being punished for (trying to take) another woman's man, which Julie eventually attempts in this film. So much of the plot is ripped wholesale it almost feels unfair to punish Jezebel, but in Wyler's film it all feels so slight compared to Gone with the Wind, and the few ways that the later Fleming film should be improved, specifically around racism, are not addressed in a movie like Jezebel. If anything, Julie uses the slaves in her film more as props than Scarlett did, at one point singing with them gaily as she starts to lose her grip on her sanity, in a scene that feels uncomfortably like she's using a group of black people as metaphors to indicate her straying from reality.
The movie also doesn't really know how to treat the central romance, and Julie herself. Unlike Scarlett, who has a sense of purpose not with Rhett or Ashley or the war, but to her home (to Tara), Julie doesn't really have that guiding light. She's obsessed with Preston, but we don't entirely know why other than he's the one thing she can't have. It doesn't feel like they're actually in love, particularly since Preston Dillard is a massive dud of a character. This is weird to say about Henry Fonda (if you've read this blog long, you know I'm a fan-this is not an actor I criticize frequently, if at all), but he is totally wrong for this part. The two reportedly had an affair in real life, but Davis & Fonda have zero chemistry onscreen, and he feels all wrong for this part. There's no charisma, and while Davis is knee-deep in an authentic southern accent, the Nebraska-born Fonda does little to buckle his home-spun Midwestern cadence. The result is a central romance that never takes off, and feels like a total failure, quite frankly-Fonda is actively bad in this movie.
Davis is good, though upon revisit she's not as good as I remembered, mostly because I've seen a lot more of her work in the years since and I know what she's capable of doing. Few actresses of this era (perhaps no major stars of this era, period) committed to a role like Bette Davis, and that's certainly the case here. She plays Julie to the hilt, but she doesn't give her quite enough purpose. Yes, it's marvelous to behold: her soliloquies are wonderful, the way that she glances at Fonda as he forces her to dance, suddenly becoming aware that she's in over-her-head and as a rich, privileged girl this isn't a feeling she's used to, her gigantic saucer eyes somehow stretching wider...that's breathtaking and the kind of minute character work that Davis is so freaking excellent at. But there are other scenes later in the film that don't feel quite right. The callous way that she basically sends her "one true love's" brother off to his death feels like a weird editing choice, and she can't sell the final moments with Amy...there's not enough to her relationship with Preston to make her pleading work. Davis is very good, but this is not the best performance in her run, and it's hard to compare this with the heights she was about to hit with The Letter and Now Voyager, some of her best work without coming away with a slight whiff of "she's been better."
The film's other nominations, save for Best Picture (you already saw the star rating-you know where I landed) were totally earned (and for the record, while I'm not done with most of the viewings from 1938, Davis is in the running for me for both an OVP & a My Ballot nomination). Fay Bainter was the first performer ever nominated in both lead and supporting in the same year, and she got this award in part as a consolation prize for not besting Davis. It's not as showy of a role as I remembered, though she does get that great scene about "a woman called Jezebel" that would've been her Oscar clip if such things existed in 1938. She's good, subtle, the sort of woman who knows that her niece is beyond her control & she's not entirely certain how much effort she wants to put in anymore-it's a strong role that stands out because of the stellar actress behind it. The Max Steiner score is marvelous, combined with some Strauss & Stephen Foster to give us a full southern push (Steiner reportedly won the job of scoring Gone with the Wind based on this picture), and the cinematography, particularly in the last ten minutes is moody & wonderful. Kudos also have to go to the costume designers (Davis is exceptionally glamorous, and that red dress, really bronze in real life, is a showstopper), and art directors, neither of whom had this category in 1938 but surely would've been in the running. But overall, Jezebel is a movie that's fine, and might even be good, but it's impossible to escape the weight of what was to come the following year & redefine the southern saga for always in Hollywood.
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