William Wyler (22 page)

Much of the supporting cast came from Warner Brothers' able company of actors. George Brent, who was cast as Buck Cantrell, was considered one of the studio's top leading men; he appeared in countless films as either the first or second male lead, including eleven films with Bette Davis. Brent was an undistinguished actor, but actresses adored him. Davis had an affair with him in 1934; that same year, he was requested by both Greta Garbo for
The Painted Veil
and Myrna Loy for
Stamboul Quest
. Davis remarked that Brent had an excitement he rarely transferred to the screen. In
Jezebel
, however, Wyler coaxed him into giving one of his better performances.

Fay Bainter, playing Julie's Aunt Belle, went on to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Davis, who unselfishly appreciated the work of other cast members, commented, “Her performance in
Jezebel
was an enormous contributing factor to the believability of the picture as a whole and to my performance in particular. Julie would never have been as great a success for me without her.”
¹³

Other actors of note were Donald Crisp as Dr. Livingston, Richard Cromwell as Ted Dillard (Pres's brother), and Spring Byington as Mrs. Kendrick. Anita Louise was the original choice to play Amy, Pres's New York wife, but she was a flamboyant blonde who did not look the part of a proper, demure wife. Margaret Lindsay, who had appeared with Davis in
Dangerous
, was cast instead.

Henry Fonda was a last-minute choice to play Preston Dillard. Wallis had originally toyed with the idea of casting an unknown actor, Jeffrey Lind (later known as Jeffrey Lynn), who was appearing on stage in Chicago.
¹⁴
He also considered Franchot Tone. Fonda, who was still a year away from the roles that would make him an A-list star, was known as a paradigm of honesty and sincerity. Davis, who had appeared with him the year before in
That Certain Woman
, directed by Edmund Goulding, liked Fonda and was pleased when he was cast opposite her.

Fonda's contract stipulated that he could leave the production by December 17 to be in New York for the birth of his child. However, Wyler's excessive retakes and Davis's illness, followed by an outbreak of pimples on her face, resulted in delays. Fonda had to leave before the film was wrapped, so Davis filmed her close-ups out of sequence with her director. She recounted, “All those close-ups of me showing my love for Hank were shot after he had finished his scenes and left the lot. It was Willy—off camera—I was looking at!”
¹⁵
By that time, Davis did not have to draw on her acting skills: she had fallen in love with her director and was having an affair with him. Shortly after finishing the film, she learned she was pregnant. Years later, Davis admitted, “Looking back, I should have married Willy after my divorce…and taken the chance that it would work out…. After four husbands, I know that he was the love of my life. But I was scared silly.”
¹⁶
Wyler, for his part, was not in love with Davis, and after his tempestuous, short-lived marriage to Margaret Sullavan, he did not relish the idea of marrying another successful actress.

Jezebel
is a film about social conventions and values and an individual's ambivalent attitude toward them. It also examines, as do all of Wyler's best social films, the role of individual action amid the pressures of historical forces and cataclysmic public events. Even though playwright Owen Davis was not a southern writer, he was aware of the literary tradition he was working in, and although he could not come to grips with some of the serious issues introduced in his play, he paid lip service to them. A central aspect of this tradition is the legend of the South—the myth of a community and a charmed way of life. The Civil War threatened to destroy this way of life, which only made it more fiercely cherished and more vital to the aesthetic form the legend would eventually assume. This legend of the antebellum South would, of course, become the controlling subject of
Gone with the Wind
. Wyler's
Jezebel
is a more nuanced and complex work than either Davis's play or the legendary film based on Mitchell's novel.

Jezebel
's stature as a film is also a testament to Bette Davis, who gave a career-changing performance—one that altered her status at Warner Brothers and made her that studio's undisputed female star for the next decade. Davis's collaboration with Wyler is considered one of the great director-star pairings in Hollywood history. Though brief, it was intense, grueling, and sometimes agonizing. Wyler was known to brood endlessly over scenes and was prone to insomnia, worrying that his mistakes as a director would be preserved on film. He empathized with Davis and understood her mania for perfection and her attention to detail. Davis told a Hollywood reporter, approvingly, that when Wyler “can't get a scene exactly as he wants it, he almost loses his mind.”
¹⁷
For his part, Wyler did not consider Davis a difficult actress: “I think one of the reasons we got on so well is that both of us wanted the same results, and Miss Davis, she's a hard worker, same as I was, and very demanding, most of all from herself. She was tireless.”
¹⁸

When they met, both were already successful. Wyler had gained a reputation as an important director, and one with a special affinity for actors. Since 1936, five actors in his films had received Academy Award nominations, and Walter Brennan had won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
Come and Get It
. The fact that Warner Brothers requested Wyler for
Jezebel
was a testament to the prestige he had gained in his profession. Davis had already appeared in thirty-five films, receiving top billing in eleven of them, and she had won an Oscar two years earlier.

According to Vincent Sherman, who would direct Davis in
Mr. Skeffington
(1944), “In the pictures she did at Warners prior to
Jezebel
, Bette had tremendous energy and a striking personality, but I don't think she was a terribly good actress. It was Willy Wyler who taught her something about films and film acting that she hadn't realized before: that the most effective moments in a film were the silent moments.”
¹⁹
Charles Affron notes, “The director [Wyler] seems to have taught the actress that finding her place in the frame is the basis of her screen being.”
²⁰

As noted earlier, the screenwriters had improved on Owen Davis's play and strengthened the character of Julie. Wyler and his leading lady, however, went further; under his direction, she learned the value of small gestures and movement within the frame, which became an integral part of her characterization. Wyler's trademark techniques—deep-focus photography, long takes, and staging within a scene—which he refined over the years, add depth and dimension to
Jezebel
. Although Wyler's work has often been criticized for his detached, classical style, this style often plays against the melodrama of the source material by adding emotional and psychological depth. Wyler's camera collaborates with the actress, a notable example being when Pres breaks off his engagement with Julie. Her face and eyes follow him as he leaves, making camera movement unnecessary. This is what Bazin means when, in dissecting Wyler's “styleless style,” he notes the importance of the looks characters give one another: “These always constitute with Wyler the foundation of the
mise-en-scene
. The viewer has only to follow these looks as if they were pointed index fingers in order to understand exactly the director's intentions.”
²¹
As Affron notes in his study of Davis's acting, “The space of
Jezebel
radiates from Davis no matter where she is in the frame.”
²²

The film is beautifully structured, as Wyler builds its design around recurring and parallel sequences: the New Orleans street shots that frame the film; two formal dinners; two parties in Julie's honor; her appearance at the Olympus Ball in a red dress, paralleled by her appearance at Halcyon in a white dress; and three sequences at the Long Bar at the St. Louis Hotel. Within the formality of the structure, Wyler creates virtuoso sequences.

Jezebel
, like much of Wyler's best early work, is primarily an indoor film. This interior focus is due, in part, to Wyler's preference for transferring stage plays to the screen, but also to his penchant for closed-in, claustrophobic settings. Within these settings, Wyler is able to explore the actors' shifting relationships to one another and to the spatial limitations of the frame, the décor, and the camera. Prior to making
Jezebel
, he had already cut his teeth on three important dramas, dissecting the disintegration of a marriage in
Dodsworth
, the effects of rumor on relationships in
These Three
, and urban decay in
Dead End
. Despite
Dead End
's outdoor locations, Wyler uses geometrical patterning and a studio-built set to create the feel of confined interior space.

Jezebel
opens in 1852 New Orleans, with the camera tracking down a busy city street. While the front of the frame features vendors selling masks and other holiday merchandise, the movement of the camera is matched in the rear of the frame by a horse-drawn carriage rolling down the street and, behind the carriage, a formally dressed gentleman walking in the direction of the camera. Wyler's first cut replicates the movement of the anonymous carriage with a close-up of another carriage—moving in the opposite direction—which lets off Buck Cantrell (George Brent) and Ted Dillard (Richard Cromwell) in front of the St. Louis Hotel. The two men descend a winding staircase to the hotel's Long Bar, which is full of upper-class gentlemen conversing and drinking. The liveliness of the bar scene matches the spirited buying and selling outside. The mood throughout is festive and buoyant.

The field of focus is not as expansive once the action moves indoors. After following Buck and Ted down the stairs, Wyler's camera, instead of taking in the rather spacious bar, shifts to medium-close shots of groups of men huddled together and talking at the bar, as if to contrast the gaiety of the season with a social system in decline. Cantrell, whose character is emblematic of a society that is out of touch with the coming of industrialism and a potential civil war, challenges another patron, De Lautruc, to a duel for mentioning the name of Julie Marsden, who is engaged to Ted's brother Preston. Uttering the name of a lady in a bar is not permissible, according to the prevalent social code. By implication, the scene also introduces us to Julie, the film's protagonist, who has, according to De Lautrec, just jilted Cantrell to become engaged to Pres. The film then shifts to the family mansion, where Julie is once again the subject of conversation because she is late to her own engagement party.

What Wyler and his writers have done here is to create a sense of suspense and anticipation in the mind of the audience, focusing on a heroine who has yet to be seen. The effect is comparable to Ibsen's strategy in introducing Hedda Gabler and Strindberg's in introducing Miss Julie—both of whom Wyler's protagonist resembles in several important respects. Each of these headstrong women lacks what Richard Gilman calls a “principle of coherence” out of which flows self-esteem.
²³
Each is psychologically and spiritually divided, thus reflecting the ongoing changes in their respective societies. And each will willingly destroy herself when confronted with the truth of who she is.

Julie's initial appearance is indeed memorable: she makes a noisy arrival on horseback in the cobblestone entryway, sitting sidesaddle, wearing a long riding habit, and carrying a crop in her hand. She barks to her young slave Ti Bat (Stymie Beard), who struggles to control the horse: “Don't stand there with your eyes bulging out like that. He knows you're scared.” Like Miss Julie's mongrel dog, which represents her mixed parentage, the horse is emblematic of this Julie's restless, hard-to-control spirit. The riding crop also echoes Strindberg's play, where Miss Julie is first mentioned when the servants gossip about how she forced her fiancé to jump over her riding crop like a trained dog. The film's Julie mistakenly thinks she can control her fiancé as well. Both women must learn that there are limits to their arrogance.

The arrival scene concludes with an inspired piece of business devised by Wyler. He wanted Davis to hike up the train of her dress with the riding crop and hook it over her shoulder as she strides into the house. Wyler asked Davis to practice this gesture until it became second nature to her, and she thought she had perfected it. Wyler, however, disagreed, and after twelve takes, he was still dissatisfied.

“What do you want me to do differently?” she asked him.

“I'll know it when I see it.” Wyler replied.

Thirty-three takes later, Wyler finally said, “Okay, that's fine,” and called an end to the day's filming.
²⁴

Furious, Davis demanded to see the takes—only to learn that Wyler was right: what she thought she had done the same way looked different each time. The early takes seemed practiced and artificial. The later ones looked more natural, but because she was feeling irritable and tired, she seemed vibrant and excitable—which was precisely what Wyler wanted and the scene demanded.
²⁵

After Julie's spectacular entrance, the camera follows her through the crowd of guests, registering her evident intention to shock them by wearing her riding habit to the party. (The scene clearly prefigures the celebrated sequence at the Olympus Ball, when she wears a red dress instead of the socially acceptable white.) Wyler orchestrates this entrance with characteristic exactness, carefully situating Davis within the frame. As Julie enters the house, she faces the camera and strides forward through the doorway and a curtained archway; then she pauses, framed by columns, to hand her riding crop to the slave, Uncle Cato (Lew Payton). She pauses again, seemingly contained under the stairway, as she hands her gloves to Uncle Cato and tells her maid that she has no time to change. Then, her riding habit flowing behind her, she moves forward and pauses again in the entranceway to the ballroom, the camera at her back. This is the fourth interior framing of the sequence, by which Wyler indicates that Julie is trapped even though she seems so free. In addition to slowing down the pace, these pauses create a subtle rhythm that gives Davis a chance to suggest through gesture Julie's more vulnerable side; these moments allow her to gain the momentum she clearly needs before facing her guests.