L'insoumise

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.

There are lots of cases in classic-era Hollywood where a hit movie has been followed by a lesser copycat from a rival studio. However, the gargantuan and protracted production of David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind was of such public interest that Warner Brothers could actually pre-emptively get on board the antebellum melodrama bandwagon before it really got going. And thus Jezebel became Warner's 1938 vehicle for its top female star, Bette Davis.

Davis had already won considerable critical and popular acclaim, establishing her type as the archetypal woman scorned. Despite having already won an Oscar for Dangerous in 1935, this is her first really magnificent performance. Her earliest work, while certainly very powerful, was often a little exaggerated and lacking control. In Jezebel however she manages to cram in all that fiery personality, even into tiny details like the way her head bobs as she walks, but with so much more finesse and restraint. The result is very realistic but still utterly engaging. Her lead man Henry Fonda could not match her for experience but he has a decent manly presence that makes him well-cast here. Fine support is given by Fay Bainter, acting like the movie's conscience, numerous reactions playing out on her face. There's also Donald Crisp, struggling with a southern drawl even though he was normally a master at accents, but giving a commanding turn all the same. And finally, watch out for a young(ish) Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.

It's no wonder there is so much top class acting in Jezebel when the director is William Wyler. Wyler, known for his repeated takes and painstaking perfectionism, no doubt had a hand in shaping Davis's sublime performance. But what Wyler also does is actually draw our focus upon the right person and the right facet of their performance for any given moment. Look at the social gathering scene where we first meet Davis and Bainter's characters. Wyler is continually rearranging the players and the camera to frame one face or another. The following scene at the bank's boardroom begins with a fairly standard establishing sweep across the table. Now, remember that Henry Fonda wasn't an especially big star at the time and audiences wouldn't necessarily have picked him out. And yet Wyler makes us realise that he is the one to watch by the way he is staring thoughtfully ahead, the only one whose face we really see full on, the one who stands out even though other characters are talking and nodding their heads. And that's in this innocuous camera move, without any obtrusive close-up or dolly in on Fonda. This is the beauty of Wyler's direction – he makes you notice things without noticing you've noticed them.

And now a few brief words on the Max Steiner musical score. Steiner represented a growing trend in Hollywood of lavish, blaring scores that underlined every single emotion in the picture. His work in particular is rather blunt and even distracting at times. This however is among his more restrained scores, and also happens to be nice and low in the mix. As it's not blasting out over every scene you can actually appreciate just how much complexity and timing there is at work here. Different characters and ideas have their own little leitmotifs. When Davis hears that Pres is returning, their love theme cuts seamlessly into the score on the very instant his name is mentioned. There is even a little peal of bells when she mentions the possibility of marriage. It's still not necessarily the best way of adding music to a motion picture, but one must at least admire the skill and precision that has gone into the score's construction.

Despite the similarities in setting and spitfire heroine, Jezebel is of course very different from its competitor Gone with the Wind in terms of scale. The latter movie, for all its melodramatic roots is a tour de force in lavish historical sweep and epic storytelling. Jezebel by contrast is a firmly small-canvas picture with a rather trite storyline, and the only thing to really keep the viewer hooked throughout is Bette Davis's arresting acting performance. Still, it is far from being some cheap knock-off, and can be considered a light piece of chamber music to Gone with the Wind's orchestral symphony.

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.

... 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.

Very good film from director Wyler, although it is its star, Bette Davis, upon whom its high quality mostly rests. This is perhaps Davis' best performance that I've seen. She plays a spoiled Southern belle whose fiancé (Henry Fonda) leaves her after a socially embarrassing event. As he leaves her, she swears that he will return, as he has in the past. And he does, one year later, with his new Northern wife in tow. The film does wonders with its historical setting, New Orleans a short while before the Civil War. A year before Gone with the Wind cooed over the fancy lives and manners of the Ante Bellum South, Jezebel was exploring them in more detail, and with a more intelligent eye. Also lurking about is the threat of Yellow Fever, which devastated New Orleans in the 1830s and is starting to grow rampant again. Another thing I really liked about Jezebel was its ending. Perhaps when it was released in 1938 there would be a feeling that Davis' character has turned a corner and has become more selfless, but to me her motives seemed awfully suspicious. That ambiguity is fascinating. Along with the leads, Donald Crisp and George Brent give fine supporting performances, and Max Steiner's score is one of the best of its era. 9/10.