Jezebel

In the pre-Civil War South, a woman (Bette Davis) uses a man (George Brent) to make her former fiancé (Henry Fonda) jealous.

Jezebel is a well-produced and technically well-crafted film that’s undone by a first half teeming with overwrought melodrama.

The first act is simultaneously stuffy and overdone. Leads Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and George Brent prattle and posture, with Davis, in her southern drawl, trying to play one off the other. There’s drama here, but it’s too obvious and, as such, feels forced. There’s little reason for us to care about any of the characters and we never see why Fonda would be with Davis in the first place, so their big break-up lacks any real punch.

Fortunately, the film gets better. Director William Wyler was tinkering with the script right up to production time, and even brought in John Huston to act as a liaison between him and the writers once shooting commenced. This may explain why the second half of Jezebel works so much better than the first, as Huston and the writers had time to adjust the script to the performers.

It’s not an obvious transformation, but the characters all go from paper-thin stereotypes to three-dimensional people over the course of the second half and the film finishes strong. In the end, if the first half had been as good as the second, Jezebel wouldn’t have been such a disappointment.