Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

JohnHowardReid Director: WILLIAM WYLER. Screenplay: Clements Ripley & Abem Finkel, and John Huston. Adaptation: Robert Buckner. Based on the 1935 Broadway stage play by Owen Davis, Sr. Photography: Ernest Haller. Camera operator: Al Roberts. Assistant camera operator: Bud Weiler. Film editor: Warren Low. Music: Max Steiner. Songs: "Jezebel" by Harry Warren (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics); "Raise a Ruckus" by Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics). Music director: Leo F. Forbstein. Art director: Robert Haas. Costumes: Orry-Kelly. Technical adviser: Dalton S. Reymond. Stills cameraman: Mack Elliott. 2nd unit director: John Huston. 2nd assistant director: Arthur Lueker. Assistant director: Robert Ross. Sound recording: Robert B. Lee. Associate producer: Henry Blanke. Production manager: Tenny Wright. Producer: Hal B. Wallis. Executive producer: Jack L. Warner.Copyright 26 January 1938 by Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall, 10 March 1938 (ran 2 weeks). U.S. release: 26 March 1938. Australian release: 21 July 1938. 12 reels. 103 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Southern belle scandalizes the Old South by wearing a red strapless gown to a black-and-white ball.NOTES: Academy Award, Best Actress, Bette Davis (defeating Fay Bainter in White Banners, Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion, Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette and Margaret Sullavan in Three Comrades). Academy Award, Best Supporting Actress, Fay Bainter (defeating Beulah Bondi in Of Human Hearts, Billie Burke in Merrily We Live, Spring Byington in You Can't Take It With You and Miliza Korjus in The Great Waltz).Also nominated for Best Picture (You Can't Take It With You), Cinematography (The Great Waltz) and Best Music Score (Alexander's Ragtime Band).Negative cost: around $1 million. Shooting commenced 18 October 1937 and finished 18 January 1938. — 42 days over schedule. (Wyler's mania for perfection — his insistence on endless takes — was blamed for the run-over).The stage play, produced by Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic opened on Broadway at the Barrymore on 19 December 1933 and ran only 32 performances. It starred Miriam Hopkins and Joseph Cotten, and featured Cora Witherspoon as Aunt Belle.COMMENT: A lavish costume melodrama designed by its creators and players as a try-out for their employment (they hoped) on Gone With the Wind. As it happened, however, only composer Max Steiner reached that goal, although Jezebel is not only excellent entertainment but excels in every aspect of its production: flawless acting dominated by the driving portrayal of Bette Davis as the self-willed Julie; gorgeous costumes and no-expense-spared sets with hundreds of extras impressively regimented in spectacular crowd scenes — Wyler successfully showing off his mastery of both action and intimate, soul-baring emotional scenes. The film's only weakness is its facile soap opera script — high class soap opera, but still, for all its impeccable staging, as sudsy as a Hollywood bubble-bath.

lasttimeisaw Often referred as a black-and-white version of GONE WITH THE WIND, or in a more dismissive but not entirely incorrect comparison, a poor man's version of it, William Wyler's JEZEBEL is not in the same league in terms of the latter's epic scale, chromatic splendor, involute sex politics or an indomitable male player to match its barnstorming female star, but honestly, as a Ms. Bette Davis' star vehicle, it gives her a helluva three-act stage to incarnate a southern belle's petulant, reckless and vindictive perversities with their concomitant ramifications in an antebellum New Orleans, to a point even her final redemption doesn't feel fully justified. Davis plays Miss Julie Marsden, a pesky and conceited patrician ingénue, who never live up to our expectation of espousal and compassion, in the first act she has no one but herself to answer for the breakup of her engagement with the young banker Preston Dillard (played by a four-square Henry Fonda but nothing more), whom she deeply loves and when she wants him back, one year later, her blithe scheme to stoke Preston's jealousy through cozying up to her long-time admirer Buck Cantrell (Brent) goes awry with disastrous outcome, not that Buck deserves our extolment, who is a foolish man blinded by his irrational hubris and abject subservience. And Preston doesn't fall into her manipulation, he doesn't want her back, because he is now happily married with a Yankee wife Amy (Lindsay), that's the second act, yet we don't see her even shed a tear for the tragedy she is partially responsible for. A yellow fever epidemic overshadows everything else in the third act, where her repentance and integrity finally well up to the fore and undergirded by a show-stopping Davis, she even transfigures her ultimate self-sacrifice into a self-pleasing triumph in that harrowing final shot, which certifies Ms. Davis' own iconic screen image, she doesn't need or want to be pitied by audience, her character must sustain her pride however vestigial it is and no matter what happens, it is a bold message sending to a sexist world and she should and would be deservingly worshiped for this conducive deed that transforms the presentation of women on the screen, who refuses to be lachrymose and takes all the gnarly consequences in her stride. Although in my book, it recoils upon the wholesome impact of the film per se, there is a fine line between being free-spirited and being thoughtlessly whimsical, Julie has no tact and no grounds to put on a winner's stance (even ostensibly for her heroism) albeit the film shrewdly brings down the curtain there without further exposition since either survival or dead would only gild the lily, after all it is a moral story to exhort young ladies to behave themselves and hits out back-handedly to the manipulative nature of a woman who is privileged with beauty and wealth. Another bad taste comes from the patronizing paragraph of treating black people like uncouth chanting animal, quite an eyesore for viewers in this day and age, that is something even Wyler's scrupulous direction and Max Steiner's sonorous score cannot temper with.Ms. Davis won her second Oscar for this intrepid work at the age of 31, and in hindsight, an honor which has come premature among her 11 nominations in toto, and probably denies her another trophy for her absolute apotheosis in ALL ABOUT EVE, although 1950 is a such a wonderfully competitive year for actresses. Fay Bainter also takes home a golden statuette for her cracking supporting turn as Aunt Belle Massey, who always stays in close range to counterpoint Julie's disaster-prone caprices with decorum graced with solicitous concern and subtle tenderness, it is also worth mentioning that Ms. Bainter is the first actress being nominated in both leading (for Edmund Goulding's WHITE BANNERS) and supporting categories in the same year, which means she has to compete with two Jezebel co-stars, loses to Davis, but wins over Spring Byington, who is nominated in Frank Capra's YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (1938).

Martin Bradley 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.

zardoz-13 Bette Davis gives a memorable performance as the eponymous character in director William Wyler's "Jezebel," a tragic tale of rivalry and romance in antebellum Louisiana about a treacherous dame who defies society and flaunts custom to get what she wants. Miss Julie wants handsome banker Preston Dillard. Temperamental, vain, and sagacious, Julie lives to please only herself and to the devil with anybody else. Basically, this is a classic treatment of girl wants guy, girl loses guy, and girl wins guy back of the most unorthodox kind. ScenaristS Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, and John Huston based their sensational screenplay on Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Owen Davis' drama and there isn't a moment that isn't gripping. Mind you, "Jezebel" is not only set in the pre-Civil War South, but it was produced in Hollywood during the Jim Crow era. The protagonist makes a disparaging remark about sullen African-Americans and Wyler presents the slaves as obsequious and ignorant in their happiness. However, though this casts a pall over the narrative, it doesn't detract from his evocative portrait of a woman who refuses to stop loving her man even when he has taken a marriage vow to another woman. Incredibly enough, "Jezebel" gives a fairly accurate depiction of the troubles that plagued the South in those days before the Civil War. Nobody gives a bad performance and George Brent is particularly good as Buck Cantrell, an arrogant, pretentious blow-hard who receives his comeuppance. Oscar-winning "Gone with the Wind" lenser Ernest Haller makes everything look appropriately cinematic and you can tell who occupies the moral high ground. Wyler stages the duel between Buck Cantrell and Ted Dillard in such a way as to generate undeniable suspense. "Jezebel" is simply brilliant.