Well, say it! What are you thinkin’?
I’m thinkin’ of a woman called Jezebel who did evil in the sight of God.
It seems impossible to approach this movie without putting it in the grand context of Gone With the Wind. This movie takes place in the pre-war South and revolves around a deeply toxic and manipulative Southern belle, played to the absolute hilt by Bette Davis. Davis has always been talked about as if she were in the running to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, even though this is most likely untrue, and so I think a lot of people see Jezebel as a kind of consolation prize, even though it came out the year before Gone With the Wind. Personally, I find all of the Gone With the Wind talk surrounding this movie to be a little dull, even though I’ve just done a little of it. For me, Jezebel is a movie that stands on its own strengths.
It is, as so many Bette Davis movies are, the story of a strong, willful woman brought low by her own passions and this is really one of my favorites of Davis’ movies of the late 1930s. She’s always been a favorite actress of mine, something that I have been admittedly influenced in by the fact that she’s always been my mother’s favorite actress, so Bette Davis was a huge part of my introduction to classic Hollywood cinema. I think she has a great part here as the headstrong, devilishly stubborn and often mean-spirited Julie Marsden. She enters the movie riding in on a whirling horse, working her riding crop. She then dismounts and the way she picks up her riding skirt with the crop tells you everything you need to know about the character. Apparently, it took them over 40 takes to get that bit with the skirt exactly right and that tells you everything you need to know about William Wyler, the director of the film. Wyler’s movies were always just more elegant than those of his peers in the studio system and it’s probably because of his exacting perfectionism that some of the shots here, like a long shot at a fancy dress ball, are as beautiful and striking as they are. That perfectionism apparently got Davis and Wyler butting heads on set, but, as so often happens with people with these kinds of fiery temperaments, their passionate disagreements turned into a passionate sexual affair that lasted the entirety of the shoot. So, if you think Wyler’s camera loves Davis here, well, it does.
But, luckily, that love doesn’t extend to sugar-coating the character or making her sympathetic or even giving her a redemption at the end (no spoilers, don’t worry). She’s one of Davis’ most toxic characters, manipulating everyone she can, driving away those she can’t and causing overall mayhem. There’s an amazing scene where she has just kind of dropped an emotional atom bomb on some characters and she then just starts singing Raise a Ruckus, gathering all the enslaved people around her to join her song and the slavery isn’t even the most disturbing part of that scene. Her mad, frenzied singing and clapping is absolutely chilling. The film’s tone is pretty relentlessly dark overall. The scourge of Yellow Fever hangs over everything and when the main characters flee the city to their country plantation in order to escape the danger, you still feel the encroaching darkness headed in their direction. There are some comedic lines here and there and George Brent is on hand as the rakishly charming cad Buck Cantrell and he gets some great laughs. Brent’s an actor I have typically found to lack much in the way of charisma, but he’s fantastic in this. But all his affability doesn’t protect him from Julie’s games. Also here in support is Henry Fonda and, yes, he’s playing the conscience of the film in a way, a young man who’s gone away to the North and come back with some mighty peculiar ideas about, you know, owning people and things like that. But the movie is really smart in how it works with his character. While he is definitely a character with some nobility and some genuinely good morals, he’s also kind of priggish and stubborn. There are moments where he contributes to the bad situations going on just as much as Julie does and sometimes it's out of a misplaced sense of morality. When something is morally bad, he knows it; but sometimes he also mistakes stupidity for moral badness and takes it on himself to mete out punishment for it. The character somehow manages to play to Henry Fonda’s type and against it at the same time and I really loved it. He’s the better man than Buck Cantrell, but he’s not as likable, and I found the push and pull between those dynamics to be very well written and acted. Fay Bainter took home an Oscar for her role as Julie’s long-suffering aunt and, while I haven’t seen the other supporting nominees that year, she’s so good that you kinda feel like she probably deserved it as much as anyone else would have.
It's a film I’ve seen, I think, three times now and I really love it even more every time I see it. It’s just a great character study centered on a great performance by Davis and a script that isn’t afraid to go really dark. Wyler’s direction is sophisticated and elegant and it’s just all around a great movie. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Bette Davis’ phenomenal central performance anchors this dark character study of a Southern belle brought low by her passions; more than just a Gone With the Wind knock-off. 4 stars.
