Many people might be tempted to compare Jezebel to the film that would win the Oscar for Best Picture one year later, Gone with the Wind. However, they aren't similar at all despite both being about willful Southern belles. Bette Davis’s Julie Marsden puts Scarlett O’Hara to shame in terms of her abilities to manipulate people. Having two strong female characters from the South in back-to-back years would make comparisons inevitable, but Davis must make an unsympathetic character into one we like and even admire by film's end. Vivien Leigh's Scarlett is never truly fully a woman we can't like. We can certainly feel sorry for her or perhaps wonder at some of the silly choices she makes, but she never loses our sympathy the way that Julie sometimes can. It’s a rather unlikely redemption arc that the film follows for her, but in the hands of Bette Davis, it’s completely believable.
Jezebel is about the mores of a time before the Civil War, but the point upon which its plot revolves is a wave of “yellowjack” or “yellow fever,” one of those that periodically swept through the swamps around New Orleans and decimated that city's population. In the midst of a threat of an outbreak, we watch as Julie destroys her chance at love. She loses the man she loves because of her inability or lack of desire to follow the rigid guidelines for "proper" behavior in antebellum Louisiana.
It's intriguing to consider some of the "shocking" behavior that Julie exhibits. She wears a riding habit (what they call “horse clothes”) to a party because she hasn't had time to change. The party guests, including the always entertaining Spring Byington as Mrs. Kendrick, give her the once-over to suggest just how galling they find her attire to be. She walks into a bank to ask Preston why he isn't joining her at a dress fitting. Only men would have been allowed in a bank during the 1850s, presumably, judging from the looks on the faces of the other patrons and bank employees. And wouldn’t it be strange to have a man at a dress fitting when he’s not married yet to the woman trying on dresses?
Speaking of outfits, Julie wearing an infamous red dress to the Olympus Ball, an event where young unmarried women are expected to wear white to demonstrate their virginity, I guess, is one of the best known sequences in the film. One of my friends always referred to this as the “malaria ball” because it stands out so much. Others try to warn Julie not to wear such a vulgar color, and I’ve always suspected that it’s because a red dress at that time might be associated with a, uh, loose woman? Everyone responds to her arrival at the ball as if she were contagious. Watch Davis's face as Henry Fonda’s Preston Dillard forces her to dance after everyone else has left the floor out of shame or embarrassment or some other "appropriate" reaction to her choice of attire.
Preston leaves for New York due to his obligations to the Dillard family’s banking business, but he returns a year later with, gasp, a Yankee wife, Amy. Julie tries to attract his attention by wearing, at last, the white dress she was supposed to wear to the ball, but he’s devoted to his wife and resists Julie’s attempts at seduction. Now, you’d think that a reasonable person might give up, but much to the shock of her Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter, stealing every small moment in a supporting role), she vows to break up her ex-beau’s marriage rather than concede defeat. Again, a movie built around such an unsympathetic, willfully “bad” character shouldn’t work as well as it does here.
Davis’ Julie has a fire in her eyes when she doesn’t get her way, and it leads to some incredibly horrible behavior. Perhaps most shocking of all, she gets her friend Buck Cantrell (George Brent) killed in a duel over her honor, the second time he has had to defend her after their break-up. To commit this kind of "sin" yet still have some viewer sympathy takes an actor with an amazing talent. She, of course, is the primary focus of the film, and she’s at the height of her acting abilities here. However, there are other people in the film worthy of praise. A young Fonda brings a strong, stoic sense of moral rectitude to his part. Brent plays Buck as the sort of dashing young man lots of women at the time would have found irresistible but whom Julie rejects in favor of Preston. I always thought Brent was underrated as an actor, and his performance here is an example of just how good he was. Donald Crisp gives his usually reliable support as the doctor who keeps trying to warn everyone about an impending yellow fever epidemic.
The technical aspects of the film are also first-rate, fine examples of the studio system’s quality. Look at the tracking shot at the beginning of the film that transports us through the street market or even the one at the Olympus Ball that swirls around Julie and Preston before the camera rises above them to give a full view of the ballroom and its inhabitants. Listen to the score by Max Steiner, who would write that oh-so-memorable score for Gone With the Wind the next year. Admire the production design, especially of Halcyon Plantation, where several characters have to wait out the latest yellow fever outbreak that has swept through New Orleans. And, of course, check out those fantastic dresses by Orry-Kelly that Julie wears. This movie is, in many ways, about Davis’s costumes: the riding habit, that red gown, the redemptive white dress, all of them. Even the dress she wears in the final moments of the film is fantastic although I think it’s really too glamorous to wear for a trip to a leper colony.
Because this film is set in the South before the Civil War, we must grapple with the depictions of the black characters. I would just note that it takes a lot of gall for a group of white Southerners to talk about abolition at a dinner party where all of the servants are black. The filmmakers must have been commenting on this kind of hypocrisy, but the movie still traffics in stereotyping. There’s even a horrid sequence where Davis joins a large number of black characters singing “Raise a Ruckus.” None of the African American actors play significant characters, but you might still recognize Stymie Beard of “Our Gang” fame, Eddie Anderson (who would later play Rochester alongside Jack Benny), or perhaps Lew Payton as Uncle Cato. Payton, a character actor who appeared in lots of films, and Fonda have an interesting scene where Preston asks Cato to have a mint julep with him, but Cato, certainly aware of where he is, says he will take his drink outside. You might also note Theresa Harris as Zette, Julie’s servant, who was in dozens of movies but often in uncredited roles. She’s such a beautiful, accomplished actress that she makes her few moments on screen memorable.
At film's end, Julie sacrifices on behalf of someone else, and the transformation is an astonishing one. She has been such a bitch throughout much of the film, so defiant and mean-spirited, that to see her consider someone else's life above hers is a bit of a shock, particularly since she does so for the "right" reasons. She manages to convince Amy to let her go to the leper colony where the yellow-fever-infected Preston will be confined in Amy’s place. It’s wild to think that Amy consents. The final sequence of Julie atop a wagon filled with sick, possibly dying people, including her former fiancĂ©e, is powerful. I'd compare the close-up of her face at the end of Jezebel to be as iconic as Garbo's final shot in Queen Christina. It's that memorable, that indelible an image.
Oscar Wins: Best Actress (Bette Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Fay Bainter)
Other Nominations: Outstanding Production, Best Cinematography, and Best Scoring
