Jezabel

... because in the Bible Jezebel was a worshipper of Baal who encouraged brutality against all who opposed her. Bette Davis as 1852 southern belle Jule Marsden, just seems at first intent on subverting the will of her fiance Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda) to her own. Their battle of wills escalates until she wears a red dress to a ball when all single women are supposed to dress in white. An unexplainable southern custom with probably silly roots, just like everybody calling a slave "Uncle Kato" when he is NOT your relative, he is forced labor. But I digress. Preston and Julie break up over the issue of the red dress, and Preston leaves New Orleans and goes to New York to take a job in a sister bank to try and forget. Who knew that banks had branches in the 1850s?

Preston is gone for a year. Julie finds her pride is cold comfort, and when Preston returns she intends to beg his forgiveness. Unfortunately, life is what happens when you are making plans and Preston returns from New York with a wife - Amy (Margaret Sullivan). Julie is devastated because marriage in 1850 is pretty much permanent, and yet she plans to break up this marriage which she considers illegitimate at least partially because Amy is a Yankee. This is where the plot goes a bit haywire. Julie does lots of disruptive things, but she is just plain terrible at executing her so-called cunning plan.

Did Preston marry Amy on the rebound and just intended to stick with it because he is a southern gentleman? Is Julie perhaps obsessed at this point rather than in love - like Scarlet O'Hara was with Ashley Wilkes - but just figured that out sooner? I don't know. The actors never tip their hand. Maybe because of astute direction, maybe because of a lack of direction so they don't know themselves.

I'd say this film is reverse synergy - the parts are greater than the whole. Bette Davis' acting was surely worthy of her Oscar, because her acting transcends the meandering plot. The dress looks red in the ballroom scene in spite of the black and white photography. All of the small individual scenes are so well done, and you have great supporting performances in the persons of Fay Bainter, George Brent, and Donald Crisp. I'd give the plot just a 5/10. All of the other things I mentioned raises my appraisal to a 7/10. An unpopular opinion I know.

Bette Davis dominates the whole movie with a mesmerizing performance,which earned her a second Oscar. As the love of her life we find a young and handsome Henry Fonda.Davis,who sometimes overacted gloriously, is kept more subdued by master director William Wyler. Her performance is the better for it.George Brent,playing the other male lead, has rarely been better.As the southerner unable to change his obsolete ways,he's a marvel.The musical score by Max Steiner is one of his best and adds to the brilliant depiction of a bygone era. Depiction of African-Americans in movies from this era are often very racist, but I found some scenes were they were portrayed more sympathetic than in other movies of the thirties. Jezebel is one of the best movies I have seen with Bette Davis.

They said that nobody was better than Bette than when she was bad and in "Jezebel" she is pretty rank, hardly batting an eye as she encourages her suitors to fight duels over her. This is the one in which she wears a red dress to the ball when it was the custom for unmarried young ladies to wear white. Naturally she not only scandalizes the town but loses her uptight fiancée (Henry Fonda, excellent) as well. Of course she redeems herself in the end but it takes a dose of Yellow Fever for her to do it.

It was said she got the part as compensation for losing out on the role of Scarlett O'Hara and to make up for the slight she also got a (richly deserved) second Oscar. She's quite wonderful in the part as is Fay Bainter as her Aunt Belle, (Bainter also won an Oscar), and, as God is my witness, even George Brent is good this time round but then that great actor's director William Wyler was at the helm. It was, of course, a prestige production and John Huston was one of the three credited script writers and if the material was something of a sow's ear Wyler did manage to make a silk purse out of it.

It is 1850's New Orleans, and Julie Marsten (Davis), a head-strong young woman who doesn't find it the least improper to be late for her own engagement party because she feels like riding her horse instead, is getting married to Preston Dillard (Fonda). Unfortunately, Preston isn't at the party because he is hammering out business at his family's bank; when they are married, he and Julie will be moving north, an almost sacrilegious action during this time. Buck Cantrell (George Brent) is Julie's former beau, who remains a family friend and still defends Julie's honor. One day, when Preston doesn't drop everything to attend a dress fitting for Julie that he had originally promised to attend, she defiantly insists that she purchase a red dress, breaking the white dress only tradition for the ball they were attending. Despite the protestations of everyone she knows, including Preston, she wears the dress to the ball, causing her to be ostracized and the official break up of her engagement to Preston when he realizes that he cannot deal with her headstrong attitude. He leaves for the north without her, and comes back a year later with a surprise, and sees that Yellow Fever has gripped New Orleans, a peril that threatens everyone.

"Jezebel" is a tale of defiance, love and redemption. Davis plays her role so well that it is hard to determine whether you want to support her or marginalize her as a spoiled brat. I think that even when the film was made, (1938) the lines were still blurred as to how many freedoms and how much free-thinking should be afforded to women. It is easy for me to say that Julie's red dress was much ado about nothing, but then again, this is the millennium, when nothing is overtly shocking anymore. The mere fact that I thought so much about a classic film (which generally has throwaway plots) is a true testament to Davis' performance and the writing, under William Wyler's direction. "Jezebel" is essentially "Gone with the Wind" without the budget or the color, and was made the year before that film was released. Most of the characters are fairly throwaway, but the subject is Julie, and her development is amazing and very believable, despite the melodramatic genre. This is a film that most classic film lovers have seen, I'm sure (I am apparently a late bloomer in regard to this film) but if you are one and you haven't seen it, or are a Bette Davis fan, see this movie. Most of her late 30's to 1950 films are so spectacular just because of her performance (if the rest is good, it's gravy), and this is one of her best known performances. 7/10 --Shelly

Jezebel was Bette Davis's consolation prize for losing the Scarlett O'Hara sweepstakes. Considering the sacrifice that the title character makes in this film, it is fitting and proper that Davis got this role because she could have had Scarlett, but she wouldn't make Gone With the Wind if it included Errol Flynn as Rhett Butler.

Julie Marsden is as willful and and spiteful a southern belle as Scarlett O'Hara ever could be. But Scarlett would never deliberately violate the code the way Julie does and wear that red dress to a cotillion. Just simply not done in the best families.

Bette Davis is Julie and while she's going to be married to the very proper Henry Fonda, she likes the idea that she can still turn the head of every young blade in New Orleans. Especially George Brent's head as the dashing Buck Cantrell.

When Fonda doesn't jump at her beck and call he prefers doing business to catering to her whims she decides on a daring move. This is a woman who cannot stand not being the center of attention. She wears a red dress to a cotillion when polite society dictates that all the unmarried young ladies wear white. When she does, New Orleans society shuns her as effectively as the Amish can and Davis retreats to her plantation upriver.

Fonda goes north and returns after a while to New Orleans with Margaret Lindsay who he is now married to. An insult our southern belle won't put up with. Davis sets in motion a string of events that results in a lot of tragedy.

I have to say that just a description of the plot seems a bit ridiculous at times, but Bette Davis does make this whole thing quite believable. She won her second Oscar for Best Actress in this film and as her aunt who occasionally gives her a reality check every now and then Fay Bainter was named Best Supporting Actress of 1938.

Fonda and Brent are fine in their parts, but they are in support of Bette Davis in a Bette Davis film. Another performance I liked is that of Donald Crisp as the doctor who fights a lot of prejudice and ignorance in New Orleans in trying to deal with yellow fever.

Looming over all of the film is the knowledge we have that this society will come crashing down in another eight years or so in events so well told in Gone With the Wind. This film should be seen back to back with Gone With the Wind as a view of southern society.

This was Bette Davis's first film with director William Wyler who she admired above all other directors. Davis was not generous with praise for colleagues so any kind words towards one are really something. Apparently Wyler did have the magic touch in handling Bette.

Jezebel is one of Bette Davis's finest films, maybe not the finest, but definitely right up there. Unlike Davis's first Oscar for Dangerous which she said was a consolation for not winning for Of Human Bondage, this one she was proud of. And we're proud of it too.