Jezebel

Jezebel – Bette Davis was offered the part of a strong-willed New Orleans girl as consolation for being passed-over for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Davis was awarded an Oscar for her performance in this 1938 melodrama conventionally directed by William Wyler. The film has become important recently as a vehicle for feminist critics, and, despite the fact that the script is primarily by an ultra-male-chauvinist, John Huston, the movie clearly lends itself to interpretation in that vein. Bette Davis plays a spoiled debutante dividing her time between a plantation estate called Halcyon and a town house in teeming, exotic New Orleans. Her beaux is Henry Fonda, a local banker with progressive notions – ultimately, he marries a pallid Northern girl to the chagrin of Ms. Davis’ character. The theme of the film is that women must follow fashion conventions, which encode social norms, with perfect fidelity or they will be destroyed. But the film also makes the point that following such norms leads to a life of subservience, dramatized by a queasy-making wife-beating subtext in the first third of the film – Fonda is told to beat Davis into submission and, in fact, plans to do so, but lacks the nerve of the other southern gentlemen who propose this to him. First, we see Davis appearing at a soiree in her riding costume – clearly out of place, but enjoying the attention lavished upon her for her disregard for convention – apparently, a little unconventionality adds spice to life and is authorized. To revenge herself on Fonda (who has refused to help her pick out the gown for an important ball), Davis wears an inappropriately seductive red dress. She is shunned by all and nearly induces a pointless duel – a speciality with her itsseems. Dismayed by her childish selfishness, Fonda goes north and marries a Yankee. Davis, not aware of his nuptials, waits for him in New Orleans and puts on a white dress, perfect for the ball that she has ruined, when he returns. But he’s with his bride and her encounter with him, in which she kneels to plead for his forgiveness—yet another spectacular histrionic gesture – is a cringe-inducing catastrophe. (Once again, she’s all dressed up but for the wrong occasion.) For revenge, she provokes another duel with fatal results and, then, when the Yellowjack fever strikes, redeems herself by accompanying the dying Fonda to Lazarette Island, a leper colony and quarantine where victims of the epidemic are sequestered. This last gesture is her most melodramatic extravaganza and, in my reading of the film, completely defeats the whiny Northern wife, left to contemplate her own cowardice as Davis’ character, looking great as always, goes to her fate with her comatose beloved. The film is phony on lots of levels but mildly entertaining. It has big lavish production values but is unimaginatively shot and edited. The scene where Davis persuades the northern belle to abandon her dying husband to the ministrations of the heroine has self-important stagy speeches that are evidence of the scriptwriters’ attempta to plaster over with rhetoric aspects of the picture that can’t be reasonably (or, at least, palatably) justified. Echoing Scarlett O’Hara, Davis says that she will be able to save poor Fonda (I think he’s named “Priss” in the film) because she alone has the gumption to “fight for him” and that she knows how to “fight” – a speech inconsistent with everything we’ve seen. Davis’ attempts to fight for anything throughout the film have been uniformly destructive to everyone, including herself. The entire proto-feminist plot is rendered inadvertently ridiculous by the presence of many black actors, all playing the parts of slaves, and, of course, representing a substratum of people truly oppressed in whom the film shows only a passing, and superficial, interest.