William Wyler (1938)
Julie Marsden is orphaned, wealthy, self-centred and wilful. This young socialite in antebellum Louisiana is miffed when her banker fiancé Preston ‘Pres’ Dillard considers his work so important that he doesn’t accompany Julie on a trip to buy her costume for the most important event of the New Orleans social year. On a retaliatory whim, Julie decides on a red dress for the Olympus Ball, knowing full well that convention demands that unmarried women wear white. She has great fun scandalising the costumier, her friends and, especially, Pres but the shocking violation of etiquette proves her undoing in a big way. At the ball, Julie is ostracised by all concerned, except her fiancé. When she regrets what she’s done and begs him to take her home, Pres insists that they take to the floor. They dance alone: Julie’s solecism and shame are cruelly exposed. A disastrous evening culminates in the breaking of the couple’s engagement. A year later, yellow fever sweeps through New Orleans and Julie’s household decamps to Halcyon, the family plantation some way out of the city. In the months since Pres disappeared from her life and headed north on business, Julie has become a social recluse but the fever epidemic offers her a chance to put things right. Pres has returned to New Orleans and is lending his support to the efforts of Dr Livingstone, a mutual friend of the Dillard and Marsden families, to pressure the city authorities into measures to control the spread of disease. He comes to the plantation house, where Julie presents herself to him in a virginal, would-be bridal white dress. When she discovers she’s too late – Pres is accompanied to Halcyon by a wife, the New Yorker Amy Bradford – Julie spitefully tries for the best revenge she can. She eggs on Buck Cantrell, an old flame, with the intention of disconcerting Pres and Amy, and provoking an argument between the two men.
Jezebel, with a screenplay by Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel and (the) John Huston, is adapted from a 1933 stage play of the same name by Owen Davis, Sr. The play wasn’t a hit but Warner Bros made a film of Jezebel at the height of another fever epidemic – the Gone with the Wind virus that raged through Hollywood from 1936, following the publication and wild success of Margaret Mitchell’s novel. (Jezebel reached the screen the year before Gone with the Wind.) Like Scarlett O’Hara, Julie Marsden (a) is, through her outrageousness, a lot more entertaining than her conformist Southern demoiselle peers, (b) must pay for her scheming and selfishness and (c) shows her mettle in a matter of life and death. It’s fitting, to put it mildly, that Julie is played by Bette Davis, whose forthrightness and willingness to play dislikeable characters made her distinctive among her Hollywood contemporaries, and whose dramatic range ensures that Julie is compelling throughout. Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter) compares her niece to the Old Testament queen Jezebel, ‘who did evil in the sight of the Lord’, but Julie’s fate is neither as gruesome nor as clear cut as that of the biblical prototype. Thanks to Davis and to William Wyler’s astute direction, she’s a satisfyingly ambiguous character to the very end. When Pres (Henry Fonda) succumbs to yellow fever, Julie persuades Amy that she, Julie, should be the one to accompany him to the quarantine island. In the caravan of carts transporting fever victims to the lazaret, Julie, whose red dress once made her a social leper, sits beside Pres. Her attitude blends fearless devotion with a hint of triumph. Julie is finally heroic; she has also got her man back.
Julie Marsden may be individualistic but she’s also a representative of the culture of which she’s part; and Jezebel‘s portrait of the South in the decade preceding the Civil War and the abolition of slavery is, like the main character, equivocal. This isn’t just because the film is typical of its time in the nostalgic Old South details (mint juleps in frosted glasses, and so on) and, especially, in the offensive characterisation of Julie’s black servants as vaguely comical and, regardless of their age, childlike. Pres returns married to the North and to what Buck Cantrell (George Brent) et al regard as pernicious ‘modern’ ideas. But when Julie tells Pres that the South and thereby she are ‘in his blood’, he doesn’t convincingly refute her arguments – even though he professes love for his right-minded, dull wife. Southerners aren’t only more amusing than Yankees; they win out too in native wit and practical knowhow. Insisting that she alone can help save Pres’s life on the lazaret island, Julie draws attention to skills she has and which Amy lacks. The new Mrs Dillard has been ridiculed earlier as a woman who ‘probably knows calculus’; it’s Julie who understands creole patois. At the same time, the film is scathing, in a pleasingly matter of fact way, about local codes of honour, especially duelling.
William Wyler makes the Olympus Ball a gripping drama in itself. Less obviously, he and the cinematographer Ernest Haller skilfully obscure the stage origins of the material. Most of Jezebel takes place indoors but the film is never static – it feels physically as well as emotionally dynamic. Wyler and Haller do a particularly fine job of conveying the cast’s secure characterisations in their simplest actions – crossing a room or mounting stairs (as well as speeding downstairs, which is naturally easier to make expressive). There’s admirable tension, as well as plenty of wit, in the cut and thrust of conversation at the Halcyon dinner table. Bette Davis, in one of her very best performances (and her second Oscar-winning one), builds the heroine’s headstrong self-confidence so inexorably that her humiliation at the Olympus Ball has terrific impact: Julie, who has revelled in the scandal of her outfit, is suddenly trapped in it – the red dress becomes the queen’s new clothes. In the course of a story that extends over little more than a year, Davis appears to age decades – and not evidently with the aid of make-up. Henry Fonda’s combination of innocence and punitive rectitude is a very effective foil to the star’s dazzling capriciousness. More surprisingly, George Brent works well too, as the ill-fated Buck Cantrell (a Rhett Butler très manqué). Fay Bainter (who also won an Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress) is nuanced as Aunt Belle. Donald Crisp, as the good Dr Livingstone, is, as usual, excellent. Margaret Lindsay, in the thankless role of Amy, does well to suggest the character’s complete defeat in her final conversation with Julie, even as the latter reassures Amy that she’s the only one Pres loves now. The cast also includes Spring Byington, Richard Cromwell, Henry O’Neill and Lou Payton.
13 January 2017
