A Film Canon

 

 

This magnificent film represents Wyler's first fully integrated vision of the chamber drama that he will subsequently make his own. Like These Three, most of the action takes place in two houses, but, where the earlier film suggests depth thematically, through the possibility of endless conspiracy, Jezebel suggests it stylistically, by applying the deep-focus aesthetic of Dodsworth to convey the characters' debilitation at the hands of their homes. This produces a similar paralysis, or pathologisation, of space to Camille, as evinced, generally, in Wyler's taste for immobilising characters on stairways, as if to contrast actual and potential movement, and, specifically, in the Yellow Fever that ravages the ante-bellum South where the narrative takes place. That said, Bette Davis, as protagonist Julie Marsden, surpasses the affective dichotomies of melodrama in a slightly different way to Greta Garbo, positioning herself at their precise nexus, rather than oscillating from one extreme to another; or, alternatively, replacing Garbo's ability to oscillate between comic and tragic beauty with an unnerving nexus between beauty and grotesquerie. It's this ambivalence that allows her to embody the South's contradictions - and, more specifically, to construe its various orthodoxies as necessitating precisely the infernal punishment that they promise to visit upon heretics. Although this is clearest in the measures taken to protect New Orleans from the Fever - barrels of oil burning on every corner - it finds most poetic expression in Julie's decision to wear red, rather than white, to the town ball. Not only does this clarify every 'chamber', as so much ceremony, but it reduces that ceremony to a hostile, alienating gaze, leaving Julie no other option but to pathologically identify herself with it - to "tend the house as no house has ever been tended" - such that she finally becomes indistinguishable from every space she inhabits; entombment personified.