William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  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.

  Entering the ballroom, she remarks, “Terribly sorry to be late. I had trouble with the colt.” As she speaks, she moves her body from side to side and opens up her fingers. Barbara Leaming points out, “The opening of her fingers timed to coincide with her second sentence may seem a small piece of business, especially since it all takes place so quickly…but it is precisely with such subtle effects that Bette and her director create the vivid portrait of Julie Marsden.”26 Wyler had Davis and the cast repeat this entrance sequence nine times before he felt satisfied that the timing was exactly right.

  Julie is a split and vacillating individual. She represents and embraces the “Old South” but is also a rebellious individual who must assert herself against those aspects of her world that are holding her back. The film's production notes describe her as a “product of her environment” and one who “typifies it.” In fact, “she IS the deep south, beautiful, exotic, alluring, lavish and also savage and deadly dangerous. She moves by instinct rather than reason…. Her chief traits are absolute ruthlessness of purpose, and an intellectual honesty.”27 In the notes to his treatment, Clements Ripley wrote, “The only way to stop Julie would be to kill her.”28 It is an observation that applies to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and to Strindberg's Miss Julie as well, for all three heroines are honest enough with themselves to finally embrace death rather than live with the consequences of their impetuous decisions.

  Throughout much of the film, Wyler's camera allows Julie to seemingly dominate space, while also trapping and confining her within the boundaries it has established. This ironic effect becomes apparent when she insists to her aunt that she can lure Pres away from his meeting within the male stronghold of Dillard and Sons Investments. Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter) warns her not to go to the bank, but Julie ignores her, intent on proving that she can train Pres to do her bidding. Unlike the shot of Julie entering her home late for her own party, where she dominates the expansive scene despite being framed by the entryway, Wyler now captures her, from a distance, through the bars of a bank teller's station. She is not only dwarfed by the composition but visually trapped within it—implying that Julie's first overt effort to trample on societal conventions will fail, as will her subsequent attempts. After this framing, Wyler allows her to stride all the way across the bank lobby before she is stopped at the door of the meeting room. Julie's confidence in her power is seemingly shared by the camera, but the earlier framing undercuts this confidence and even magnifies her failure when Pres tells her he cannot accompany her to the dressmaker. Julie is defeated, but she will not show it.

  Wyler then doubles this scene in a comic way in the dressmaker's shop. Seated on a stool, Julie is trapped within a hoopskirt frame while trying on a white crinoline dress, and Wyler focuses on the image of her back in a mirror, creating a frame within a frame. Uncomfortable in the white dress and determined to exasperate Pres, she demands that it be removed so that she can try on a red dress. With her underwear caught in the hoopskirt frame and exposed in the mirror as well, she flaunts herself in the red dress, which her aunt declares to be a “vulgar” outfit suitable for an “infamous Vickers woman,” as opposed to the traditional, virginal white gowns worn by unmarried women in polite society. Julie, in a show of defiance, objects: “This is 1852…not the Dark Ages. Girls don't have to simp around in white just because they're not married.” She claims to be emancipated, but the framing implies just the opposite.

  Wyler repeats some of these patterns when he features Pres. After his meeting at the bank, Pres decides to confront Julie at her home. When he enters the Bogardus mansion, the home of Julie's guardians, he is framed in the doorway, just as Julie was when she arrived late for her party. Like Julie, he hands his riding crop to Uncle Cato. When Julie refuses to come downstairs to greet Pres, he grabs a walking stick, intending to discipline her with it. Upstairs, Wyler's camera follows him as he strides across the hallway, just as it followed Julie across the bank's lobby. Here, Wyler foregrounds the balusters, which Pres clicks with the stick as he moves toward her room. This image presages the futility of his plans—he will be unable to bend Julie to his will, just as she was unable to convince him to leave his meeting.

  Julie refuses to open her door, teasing Pres while he repeatedly knocks with his stick. As in the scene at the dressmaker's shop, Julie's amused expression is triple-framed in three mirrors as she is being made up—again indicating that her rebellion will not free her from the constraints of a rigid society. (Her profiled, haughty expression in the middle mirror will be repeated in the Olympus Ball sequence, where she receives her comeuppance.) Here, her victory over Pres—she charms him into kissing her, his stick leaning impotently in the doorway—is only a temporary one. When he leaves, Pres warns her not to wear the red dress to the Olympus Ball.

  Julie's visit to Dillard and Sons is preceded by a scene in the bank's boardroom, where Pres is participating in a business conference. Like Julie, he is shown to be out of step with the attitudes of his associates. In the meeting, Pres expresses his belief that the expanding northern railroad lines and freight shipments are bypassing the South, but many of the board members see no reason to invest in the railroads, insisting that sticking with the commerce on the Mississippi River is good enough. Pres's grasp of the changing times neatly mirrors Julie's attitude toward acceptable behavior for women—in both cases, society is dead set against change.

  In the same scene, Dr. Livingston, who is also a member of the bank's board, warns about the impending yellow fever epidemic and the need to prepare for it. The board turns a blind eye to this warning as well. Yellow fever, like the idea of war, thus becomes a symbol of the South's self-delusion and its inability to face the future. Unlike Gone with the Wind, Jezebel does not sentimentalize the South, for Wyler shows, early on, the willful blindness of its social and business leaders. By the end of the film, New Orleans is a city ravaged by disease—a premonition of the coming war, which will literally and figuratively destroy the region in the decades ahead.

  The character who most directly represents the Old South is Buck Cantrell; indeed, in Owen Davis's play, he functions more as a symbol than a character. The film, however, gives Buck some added dimension and stature, showing that he is impulsive, quick to challenge others, and ready to stand up for traditional values. As he remarks at one point, “I like my convictions undiluted, same as I do my bo
urbon.” Nonetheless, he manages to exhibit a dawning awareness of the limitations of his own values and those of his society. Buck is first presented in a more sympathetic light after Julie and Pres quarrel over her dress. She sends Buck a note inviting him to pick her up the following evening, and when he arrives, she views him from above, framed by a window. Buck is seen going to the door from a high angle (one of Wyler's favorite shots), here suggesting another of Julie's misguided notions—that she can control him. Wyler's framing also foreshadows Buck's death, although, in the scene that follows, Buck will have the last word. He admires Julie's red dress, sarcastically asking, “Are you all dressed up for a hog killing?” When he realizes that she wants him to escort her to the ball to arouse Pres's jealousy, he declines, explaining that southern manners will not allow it: “It's just they got rules and they go by ’em, same as you and I.” Rebuffed, Julie turns to go inside, and Wyler emphasizes her shadow on the door, presaging not only Buck's death but also Julie's and Pres's, and the demise of the world they represent. Buck's most poignant moment comes when he is manipulated by Julie into defending her honor and his own, for Buck knows he has been betrayed. His final words to Julie before he dies—“I guess there's a lot I don't understand”— assume a much wider context than just his impending doom. Finally recognizing the shortcomings of his culture, Buck's words suggest that his view is more closely aligned with Pres's than it was earlier in the film.