Cast: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda

Director: William Wyler

Screenplay: Clements Ripley

Running time: 1 hr 45 mins

Genre: Drama/Romance



CRITIQUE:


It’s easy to mistake Jezebel from Gone with the Wind, because after all, both are filmic cousins, sharing almost identical narrative strands and convoluted history behind the making. Parallels exist therein, both set in the Southern Americana around the age of Civil War, both featuring impulsive heroines and reluctant, will-or-won’t-they romances, but whereupon Gone with the Wind is a lavish Technicolor vista, Jezebel is shot in black-and-white. Of course, the former descends into one of the most enduring classics of all-time, the latter is essentially a character-driven film, perhaps explaining its lesser mass appeal. Nevertheless, it is an incredible film primarily because of Bette Davis’s presence, unarguably the finest actress in the Hollywood Studio era. Worth noting especially is that it was released a year before GWTW, after a relentless studio battle, with Davis contemptuously stamping down her starpower, a diva of all sorts, who was originally slated to star as Scarlett O’Hara with Errol Flynn as Rhett Butler, but Davis refused Flynn’s leading man capabilities and demanded Warner Bros. to tailor her own piece. The result is Davis’s well-deserved second Oscar triumph. This superlative, incendiary performances is what classic Hollywood performances are made of, that recent stars could only dream of pulling off – her Jezebel is a heady, vain, selfish, magnificently free-spirited creature that defies any masculine domination, deciding to go horse-back riding on her engagement party just because she likes to, wearing a red dress to a ceremonial society ball (where a strict code requires all women to wear white) just because her fiancée didn’t turn up in her dress-fitting. Davis draws this character in an officious whisk, and spins her character arcs as swift as a heartbeat yet never denying her depth: that scene alone when she meets again her ex- fiancée with a new wife, her batting of her eyelids, her penetrating look as she stares from her man to his wife is an incredibly wordless yet measured performance. This story about love, loss and redemption feels fresh in the late 1930s, so when Jezebel pleads to perform her final act of self-redemption, she loses selfishness and greed and learns self-sacrificing love. What could have been an aww-moment, William Wyler, before unleashing galloping horses and Biblical epic of Ben-Hur, consolidates the final scenes in a resonant, powerful closure.


VERDICT:

Not exactly as exquisite, grandiose, sweeping piece like its cinematic sister Gone with the Wind, but it’s Bette Davis and her incredible megawatt performance that makes Jezebel an astounding one-actor’s show.



RATING: A-