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Post by BunnyWhit on Sept 29, 2024 15:51:20 GMT
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Post by topbilled on Oct 2, 2024 13:50:11 GMT
This neglected film is from 1936.
Gable and Davies are at it again
When I began watching this, I was expecting the usual shtick that we find in most of Marion Davies’ screwball comedies. But this film has a bit more to offer. Davies plays working class women in these kinds of films, yet somehow always ends up wearing glamorous clothes and hairstyles. Typically, her characters are like Cinderella, managing to find a handsome prince. Here, the prince is a pug played with gusto by Clark Gable.
The two stars had previously teamed up in MGM’s precode POLLY AND THE CIRCUS in 1932. Only someone with Davies’ clout (and the clout of her paramour William Randolph Hearst) could finagle Gable’s loan out from MGM, since he was red hot and about to be cast in GONE WITH THE WIND. Davies seems very comfortable on screen with Gable. It doesn’t matter if their characters are trading insults or kisses. At one point, Davies gets to slap Gable’s face, which is rather amusing to watch. But their best scenes together are when they are soft and tender with each other.
The title is a pun on Cain and Abel, and the story focuses on the respective careers of a boxer named Larry Cain (Gable) and a Broadway dancer called Mabel O’Dare (Davies). The two immediately clash when they first meet at a hotel one night, but then gradually start to experience real romantic feelings.
They have come up from humble backgrounds, determined to make something of themselves. Into the mix are several supporting characters, like Davies’ stage-mother-ish aunt (Ruth Donnelly); Gable’s manager (William Collier Sr.) and pal (Allen Jenkins); as well as a publicity hound (Roscoe Karns) who pulls every trick in the book to plant fake stories in the newspapers. Some of the movie’s funnier moments involve the pair fighting with each other, then pretending to be all lovey-dovey when they appear in public.
On a more serious note, the story is also about both of them taking ownership of their lives, and not believing everything that is said or written about them. There is never any doubt they won’t wind up in each other’s arms permanently, but the fun is watching the relationship grow and become something truly special.
Speaking of truly special, I have to take my hat off to Davies and Hearst who really knew how to entertain the masses. There are several very lavishly produced musical numbers where we glimpse Davies’ character performing as a successful showgirl.
The stage is filled with all kinds of talented dancers in exquisite costumes, with memorable set pieces. Of course, the main attraction is Davies throughout these numbers; the numbers are just so wonderfully choreographed and performed, the film rivals any musical that MGM ever produced.
Films like this aren’t made anymore. I dare, I Mabel O’Dare, someone to bring this delightful style of moviemaking back to audiences.
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Post by topbilled on Oct 9, 2024 12:42:52 GMT
This neglected film is from 1947.
The abandonment of morality and logical human living
Ann Sheridan is at her most alluring playing the role of a lifetime in NORA PRENTISS (1947). She’s directed by Vincent Sherman, who also helmed another melodrama she made called THE UNFAITHFUL. Both pictures exhibit top of the line craftsmanship, sharp direction, striking cinematography and music, as well as skilled supporting casts. Put the two films side by side and you have a swell double-feature.
Personally, I lean more towards this production. The narrative is crazy over the top improbable. One insane thing after another happens. But if you’re willing to suspend all disbelief, then you will find as I did, that it’s a gripping character study from start to finish. Who is Nora Prentiss? What is the power she has over men? That’s what you ask yourself as you watch her in action.
The story combines several genres. So if you don’t particularly enjoy one angle of the drama, just wait, because there is always another angle to consider. Though it is primarily a romance aimed at a female audience, there are plenty of gritty elements on display. Besides being part melodrama, the film is part gangster picture, part prison drama and part horror all rolled up into one.
Putting Sheridan in a more serious role takes her away from her usual assignments as a saucy, wisecracking gal. Here the actress is right at home as a fashionable nightclub singer. She falls for a doctor (Kent Smith) after visiting his clinic one night.
Likewise, he develops a sudden interest in her. Only, he’s married to a decent suburban wife (Rosemary DeCamp); and he has no reason to stray. He’s a highly principled, law-abiding and moral man.
But Smith can’t help himself around Sheridan. Though he knows they should not be together, he is determined to free himself from current responsibilities in order to be with her. Once he gives in and embarks on a full-fledged affair, he is willing to give up his wife; and his nearly grown children. He will even sacrifice his medical career. He is experiencing a midlife crisis; he has never done anything so impulsive before; and the wanderlust takes hold of him.
I find it intriguing that a major Hollywood studio would produce a film like this, in the immediate postwar era when the emphasis was often on nuclear families; upholding things on the right side of society, and the right side of the law. Typically, we would not expect Smith to choose Sheridan. Or, if he does, to not stray for long and regain his senses.
But Smith’s character loses his dignity. He falls into depravity and becomes increasingly desperate. Many aspects of the plot play out in defiance of the Hollywood production code. It’s not enough for Sheridan’s character to merely snag Smith, and rip him away from a life of relative stability, but she leads him far from what he knew to the point it brings about his complete loss of self.
The film’s cast includes costar Robert Alda as a gangster who owns the nightclub where Sheridan is gainfully employed. Alda doesn’t want Smith hanging around or horning in on his territory. He wants Sheridan all to himself. And frankly, who wouldn’t..?
It builds to a crescendo of violence that puts Smith in prison and eventually into the electric chair. His disgrace is only witnessed by the title character at the end. She has some warped sense of duty to him, despite everything she’s caused and everything he’s done. The irony is that his real wife (DeCamp) has already mourned his death. His second, real demise, has a feel of deja vu to it. And futility. In a strange way, this film is unabashedly bleak. It serves as a cautionary tale about the abandonment of morality and logical human living.
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Post by topbilled on Oct 26, 2024 14:54:46 GMT
This neglected film is from 1934.
“It’s where I want to be. My whole life is here.”
In a way, there are almost too many characters to keep track of in this film; and I suspect there are more in the novel by Gladys Carroll upon which it is based. Some of them are introduced in the first act, called Winter, then diminish in importance. During one of the later seasons, a whole family moves away, because they cannot make a go of their land. Often, leaving for the city is the only answer, a means of escape.
A few characters, though, do remain on screen for most of the picture. The star is Jean Muir, playing a very plain farm girl who mothers everyone around her…including her needy stepmother (Clara Blandick) and even needier stepsister (Dorothy Appleby).
She also finds time to make meals for her dad (David Landau) and counsels her brother (William Janney) that his future is in a law office, not on the farm.
This is set in rural Maine. It all starts during a harsh winter, and the story progresses through the following seasons until it comes full circle again the next winter. Living off the land is based on what happens each season, related to crops and harvesting; or to the production of dairy and sale of livestock. One compelling segment shows how a neighboring family will fall on hard times when an important cow dies. The economy is fragile in this environment.
Also fragile in this environment: matters of the heart. Muir’s character falls in love with the son of a new Polish family, played by Donald Woods. They are the couple we are meant to root for, even though they are slow to acknowledge their feelings for each other. At one point Woods leaves the area when his barn burns down, but he does come back at the end to marry Muir, providing a happy ending.
Watching the film I was reminded of my own background, growing up in rural Wisconsin. My grandfather was somewhat shiftless, like one of the characters on screen. As a result, my grandmother had to take matters into her own hands to ensure the home farm ran smoothly and the family didn’t starve. This was in the days before birth control was widely practiced. Women like my grandmother were tied down with lots of kids; my grandparents had nine, not counting some that my grandmother miscarried or lost in childbirth.
My father was the oldest, and like one of the younger characters in the movie, he tried to get away. He went off to college to forge a different career, but he did come back.
That is how my sister and I spent our early childhood on a farm. But my father didn’t make a go of it, so we left for a nearby town, then moved out west where my father found work as a teacher.
Meanwhile, my grandmother had become quite wealthy. She ended up owning seven farms and was one of the first millionaires in that agricultural community. She bought the farm we vacated; it was one of her investments. I could always go back to visit what we left behind. The land and its people have stayed with me. I still feel connected to it, no matter how many times the earth has turned.
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Post by Fading Fast on Oct 26, 2024 15:10:20 GMT
If you read nothing else, read the last four paragraphs of TopBilled's review ⇧ (you should read the entire excellent review) for the moving personal perspective he brings to the movie.
As the Earth Turns from 1934 with Jean Muir, Donald Woods, David Landau, Arthur Hohl and Dorothy Appleby
As the Earth Turns is a soap-opera-style, slice-of-life look at farming in rural Maine in the 1930s. Its classic theme of rural-versus-city life plays out among a few intertwined multi-generational families.
Farming is hard. Farming in Maine is harder with its brutally long, cold winters and short, hot summers. Today, farming is still hard, especially for family- not corporate-owned farms, but back in the 1930s, before modern technology, farming in Maine was almost a hair-shirt life.
Three families are the focus here, with David Landau playing the head of the most successful farm. He remarried after his first wife passed, bringing his new wife and her teenage daughter from Boston to live with his existing family, which includes his daughter, played by Jean Muir.
The blended family has a very modern feel, with the new wife and daughter not taking to farm life, creating a rural-city divide within the family. The second family, headed by Landau's brother, played by Arthur Hohl, has a less successful farm because Hohl is lazy.
The third family are Polish immigrants who just bought an adjacent farm because their son, played by Donald Woods, has a passion for farming. He convinced his parents to give up his father's tailoring business to move to the farm with him.
Why any immigrant family, who made the incredibly difficult journey to come to America and had established themselves in Boston, would agree to become rural farmers is one for the books. The family should have shipped Woods back to Poland and stayed in Boston.
With that setup, the movie is a look at the hardships of farming, the stresses and strain of maintaining a marriage on a farm and, for the kids, the challenges of finding friends and romantic interests in a sparsely populated rural community.
Winters are brutally cold and lonely; the soil is tough to work; rain doesn't come when you need it; essential animals get sick and die; and the market price of your produce often collapses when you have a good harvest.
Some still take to the life like Landau, Muir and Woods; while others, like Landau's new wife and daughter, the latter played by Dorothy Appleby, hate it. Love it or hate it, it's an isolated life that makes finding a mate for the young adults hard.
You need a scorecard to keep track of all the players and the interconnections between the families, but the key relationship is Muir and Woods, who should, but don’t immediately, find each other because Muir is too practical and reticent.
Her hesitancy, especially after a huge farming setback for Woods, leads him into the conniving arms of Appleby, who wants to find any way she can to get back to the city.
As those three quietly tangle, the older adults also tussle as Landau's new wife hates the farm life and resents that Landau helps his lazy brother out because it adversely impacts her lifestyle.
Landau is outstanding as the tough but not-mean farmer trying to make his farm work and keep his at-odds family together. Had he not passed away at the age of fifty-six in 1935, Landau would have had another decade or two of success in movies.
Muir is equally impressive playing the young, kind and pretty girl who naturally takes to farm life. She understands and accepts its hardships and flourishes in the challenge. Woods, her obvious suitor, is unfortunately bland, but Muir has enough spark to keep it interesting.
Appleby deserves mention, too. Her performance as the unhappy and scheming girl is believable, as she doesn't overplay her character. She's realistically selfish, not cartoonish. When she moves in on Woods, you'll hate her, but you won't stop watching her.
All of these normal personal trials – financial, blended families, finding love, finding friendship, facing the elements, choosing a career – are dramatically amplified on a farm owing to its isolation and the, sometimes, suffocating closeness of a family living and working together.
Taking place over one year, As the Earth Turns explores these hardships and the isolation of rural farming. Additionally, it highlights the city-versus-rural divide the entire country was facing then as the changing supply of jobs inspired kids to leave farms for work in factories and offices.
It also shows, the way authors like Edith Wharton and John Steinbeck did in some of their stories, that all the personal challenges of finding love, maintaining a marriage, raising kids and caring for relatives happen, with no less passion, to every generation on farms.
While As the Earth Turns may not reach the heights of a classic, its talented cast and Warner Bros.' top-tier production value elevate what could have been a simple drama into an engaging tale of rural farming.
Today, it stands as a vivid time capsule, capturing a way of life that was once integral to America, but has since faded into history. That tie to the past helps the film’s portrayal of rural life, with all its hardships and beauty, resonate even more poignantly with a modern audience.
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Post by topbilled on Oct 26, 2024 15:54:26 GMT
I read somewhere that the book is taught in Maine schools, so it has become a revered classic within that part of the country. I like your commentary, Fading Fast, on the rural-city divide.
I have to a bit of additional background on my own family. Because my father was trying to escape farm life by going off to college, he would also travel in the summers, so he wouldn't have to go back and work on the farm between semesters. By travel, he'd go to visit cousins and other relatives in southern Wisconsin or Illinois. It wasn't too far, but far enough to get away from the milking and other chores!
During some time he spent in Kankakee, Illinois (which is somewhat rural) south of Chicago, he met my mother in a tavern. The tavern was owned by my mother's aunt. My mother was also down there visiting, to get away from her family, urban snobs in Chicago. My parents must have felt a connection over the fact they did not like their respective families. They married quickly after only knowing each other a month, which quite frankly, created a lot of problems.
When my father decided to go back to rural Wisconsin and settle down with his new wife (my mother), they tried their hand at farming while my father was working on his Masters Degree in education. My mother's snobby family from Chicago would come visit, and they would mockingly tell my mother she was living the life of Green Acres (the TV sitcom). Looking back on it, since my parents had many chickens, geese and ducks, it was more like THE EGG AND I.
In some ways, though my parents did not have the best marriage, and it would end in divorce when I was a teen, those were fairly happy years on the farm. My father was not cut out to be a farmer, and his next adventure was to buy a lumber mill in another community up north. And that is when we moved from the country into a town about an hour away. I was just about eight, going into third grade, when we moved off the farm. My sister was five, and another sister had not yet been born.
As I said in my earlier post, my dad's mother bought our farm as one of her investments. One other reason she bought our farm is because she was about to give the home farm to one of my uncles who did have an aptitude for it (today my uncle Larry's son Adam still runs the original home farm, which has always been profitable).
So my dad's folks "retired" and moved to our smaller farm. I say "retired" in quotation marks, because my grandmother was a mover and a shaker. And she still grew sweetcorn and all sorts of vegetables, which they sold at a market stand. Plus she built a greenhouse and a woodworking shop for my grandfather to grow flowers and make wooden toys. They would travel around Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois selling their flowers, arts and crafts at festivals, fairs and various flea markets.
My grandmother was always trying to make an extra dollar somehow. But looking on it now, I think part of it was she liked to stay busy and go out and interact with people in the greater community...and she wanted to keep my grandfather from being too lazy!
When I would go back to visit, I would get roped into picking sweetcorn or helping them sell their wares at the outdoor festivals. These were things I didn't mind doing. Meanwhile, my father decided to sell the mill and move us out west (to Idaho and then Colorado) where he taught in a high school and a junior college. We were now away from all our relatives and the life we had known. I missed the rural peacefulness of Wisconsin. The hard work in the summer, as well as the ice fishing and snowmobiling in the winter.
Of course the story doesn't end there. When I graduated high school in Colorado, my parents had just divorced...and my mother decided I would go to college in Chicago and live with her relatives. My mother's family refused to see me as ex-farm boy. They saw me as Little Lord Fauntleroy whom they intended to make as snobby as them. So if anyone knows about the divide between rural and city life, it's me (and my mother).
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Post by sagebrush on Oct 27, 2024 13:42:22 GMT
That's a great post, topbilled, about your family's livelihood as farmers.
I don't have a similar story, but I grew up in a part of San Jose, CA, which was still very much an orchard area at the time.
My sisters and I were made by our parents to work for the local orchard owner during the summers, mostly picking peaches and apricots, to gain an appreciation of where our food came from and the hard work that goes into it.
We were allowed to keep much of what we picked, and that was fun. I think, though, the real pickers were probably a bit annoyed by us because we took so long and we would clown around in the process. They would get started right away, and move from area to area without conversation until it was time for them to take a break. Of course, the idea was to get as much done before it got too hot, and that was a lesson my sisters and I never seemed to learn.
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Post by topbilled on Oct 27, 2024 15:04:52 GMT
That's a great post, topbilled, about your family's livelihood as farmers.
I don't have a similar story, but I grew up in a part of San Jose, CA, which was still very much an orchard area at the time.
My sisters and I were made by our parents to work for the local orchard owner during the summers, mostly picking peaches and apricots, to gain an appreciation of where our food came from and the hard work that goes into it.
We were allowed to keep much of what we picked, and that was fun. I think, though, the real pickers were probably a bit annoyed by us because we took so long and we would clown around in the process. They would get started right away, and move from area to area without conversation until it was time for them to take a break. Of course, the idea was to get as much done before it got too hot, and that was a lesson my sisters and I never seemed to learn.
In addition to sweet corn, which was a very popular seller, we picked cucumbers (though we erroneously said we were picking pickles, but they are cucumbers first, before they go through the pickling process!)...and we also picked strawberries. I don't remember apples, peaches or apricots. In the strawberry field, it was easy to eat a few as we went along filling our baskets...and we would do that if we had been in a hurry to get to the field at dawn and hadn't really eaten much breakfast.
We usually walked to the fields, which were sometimes a distance from the farm house. When I was a bit older, my grandfather would let me drive a four-wheeler to one of the far fields. He had a makeshift cart attached to the back of it, with buckets inside the cart. We'd fill those buckets with the corn. I preferred using bushel baskets instead of the buckets, since the baskets were easier to lift.
We'd take what we had picked to a huge shed for sorting, so my grandmother could decide what prices she'd be charging based on the quality of the produce.
A favorite memory I have is that inside this huge shed she had a refrigerator where she kept cases of Shasta soda. And after we were all done picking and sorting, maybe eleven o'clock in the morning, she'd let us open the refrigerator to get a can of soda. Incidentally, soda is what I say now, after years of living in California and Arizona. But in the midwest, it's pop. We'd have a can of orange pop, or root beer. LOL |
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Post by topbilled on Nov 7, 2024 13:02:40 GMT
This film is from 1933.
One sensational event after another
Frankie Darro was almost 16 when he had the lead role in this Warner Brothers precode about adolescents affected by the Depression. Darro would be able to play teens for the next ten years, since he was blessed with a youthful face. As the story begins, he’s at a dance with a bunch of his pals. One of these pals (Edwin Phillips) tells him that he’s dropping out of school to take a job that will help support his struggling family.
Later when Darro mentions this to his folks (Grant Mitchell and Claire McDowell), he learns his father just became unemployed. So they are also facing economic hardship. Things go from bad to worse, when his pop is unable to find work, and the family is about to be evicted.
In the next part Darro and Phillips both decide to leave home, so they won’t be a continuing burden on their respective families. They hop a freight train and meet another wayward youth, a girl they think is a boy (Dorothy Coonan). A set of adventures follow, or should I say misadventures, with them hopping from train to train traveling across the country. It’s tough all over, no matter what region of America these characters find themselves in.
WILD BOYS (and girls) OF THE ROAD is sort of an exploitation flick. It depicts Depression era money woes, then puts a group of young people on the road, to over-dramatize their angst and exaggerate the sorrows they experience. There are also some anti-establishment elements, where the kids are harassed by police for being transients. Later when they visit Coonan’s aunt (Minna Gombell) it turns out they are visiting a brothel.
It’s one sensational event after another.
Things take an even darker turn when another girl they meet (Ann Hovey) is sexually attacked by a railroad employee (Ward Bond). So not only are dealing with unemployment, homelessness and prostitution but rape of a minor is also thrown into the mix!
As if that were not enough, Bond’s character is killed during a climactic fight scene…and Phillips’ character becomes the victim of an accident, losing his leg. Now we’ve just added manslaughter and amputation to the ongoing drama these teens are dealing with. It’s all a bit much.
The last part of the movie brings it all to a skidding halt. The kids have been caught stealing and appear before a judge. The judge has mercy on them, and they are promised jobs– a reference to the New Deal. I guess the studio could only go so far with the story’s prevailing bleakness before magically giving us a happy ending, where all is right in the end.
William Wellman and WB deserve some credit for trying to tackle hard issues. But what they’ve crammed into 67 minutes is enough fodder to make four or five different issue-oriented films. Because the picture is trying to showcase all the social and financial problems of the Depression, it overplays its hand. It’s one thing to strive for realism in cinema, but it’s quite another thing to over-egg the pudding.
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Post by Fading Fast on Nov 7, 2024 14:53:54 GMT
Wild Boys of the Road from 1933 with Fankie Darro, Edwin Phillips and Dorothy Coonan Wellman
Hollywood was once called the dream factory for a reason: it sold (and still sells) fantasy and escapism, which is why, in the 1930s, it didn't put out that many pictures focused exclusively on the hardships of the Depression. People weren't anxious to hand over a difficult-to-earn dime for a movie ticket to see, on the screen, the same misery they could see for free all around them.
Of the small number of pictures that did show the worst of the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath is probably the best known, but Wild Boys of the Road, too, doesn't pull any punches in its reveal of one of the harshest of the era's brutal struggles.
Two former middle-class teenage boys, played by Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips, leave home when they realize they are burdens to their now-unemployed parents. They hop a freight train with vague plans to get to "a city" and get jobs.
They quickly meet a teenage girl, played by Dorothy Coonan Wellman, posing as a boy, which we learn was a survival tactic after, in a gut-wrenching scene, we see her about to be raped by a railroad worker. In what could only happen in a pre-code movie, the boys then dispense the ultimate vigilante justice on the worker and the viewer, at that moment, is not worried about due process.
If there had been any youthful innocence left in these kids before, it's gone now. It's all harsh survival from here as the railway "detectives" try to chase the kids, now part of a larger gang of similar boys and girls, from the trains at each station, while the police often try to do the same when the kids build tent cities.
The kids scrounge for food and clothing, panhandle, take any job and steal (that's not shown too much, but you get it) as they move around the country with a vague hope it will be better somewhere else.
In the movie's second brutal scene, during one of the "raids" on the trains, as the kids are trying to escape the railway "dicks," Phillips falls on the track and loses his leg to an oncoming locomotive. It is an excruciating long and painful sequence. Director William Wellman had no interest in sparing his audience in this one.
The story climaxes with the kids in New York City where Darro gets arrested when he's duped into committing a crime. A kindly judge offers the three - Darro, Phillips and Wellman have stuck together the whole time - some hope, and there's even a passing reference to government programs, but Wellman's point had already been made.
Wellman understood that personalizing the stories in Wild Boys of the Road would make the misery real for the audience. At the beginning, we see Darro and Phillips, average teenage boys worried about cars, girls and dances, quickly jolted into the harsh realities of life when their families' fortunes change in a flash.
It's hard to leave the theater and return to a comfortable home after that, without some of the movie's images unpleasantly bouncing around inside your head.
That personalization only works because Darro, Phillips and Wellman, despite looking like some of the three healthiest and most well-fed children in America at that time, convincingly portray kids thrown into an ugly adult world with no real skills to survive.
The movie business itself would not have survived long had it fed America a constant diet of Wild Boys of the Road movies, which is why today, pictures like it are a valuable part of the documentation of the era. |
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Post by topbilled on Nov 13, 2024 15:37:28 GMT
This film is from 1938.
Is she immoral, wicked and shameless? Or something more?
The film is based on a play which was produced on Broadway from late 1933 to early 1934. On stage the role of Julie Kendrick, a.k.a. the jezebel, was portrayed by Miriam Hopkins. Joseph Cotten had a supporting part as one of the young men. The play wasn’t really a hit, closing after 34 performances. But Warner Brothers saw value in the property as a vehicle for its resident queen, Bette Davis. Studio execs realized that by adapting the play, they could get their own saga about a southern belle on a plantation in theaters before David Selznick’s much-anticipated opus GONE WITH THE WIND.
Just like Scarlett O’Hara, Julie Kendrick (Davis) is a spoiled rich girl living in the south. Here the setting is New Orleans, not Atlanta. And like Scarlett, Julie has a lot of growing up to do and adversity to overcome. Some of her greatest struggles involve her complicated love relationship with a guy named Preston Dillard, played by Henry Fonda. This was the second of two Davis-Fonda pairings at WB. Their previous effort was a melodrama called THAT CERTAIN WOMAN, made a year earlier.
Julie’s tumultuous dealings with Pres occur mainly in the early 1850s. A yellow fever epidemic is depicted. There were multiple outbreaks of the disease in New Orleans between 1817 and 1905. Yellow fever was typically spread by mosquitoes. Historians tell us that over 40,000 people lost their lives because of the epidemic. Many of the ones who survived did so by leaving New Orleans at the height of the outbreak.
Part of what we see in the movie has Julie maturing to help treat patients. Incidentally, most treatments at the time consisted of bloodletting or the administering of carbolic acid, and quinine, though many of these treatments were not very effective.
But before Julie comes of age during the outbreak, there are plenty of scenes at the beginning of the movie that depict her immaturity and brattiness. The best scene is one at the ball, where Julie shows up in a red dress and is forced to dance and make a spectacle of herself. There are lines in the film about questioning the value of tradition, and this scene illustrates that point.
A lot has been written about JEZEBEL in comparison to GONE WITH THE WIND. And if we are, indeed, comparing the two, then what probably hurts JEZEBEL is its black-and-white photography. Imagine the impact that would have been made if the dress that Julie wears to the ball had been shown in Technicolor.
After all, it is a huge deal that she is wearing red of all colors. The scene signifies the character’s willingness to defy the conventions of proper society.
And just like Tara in GONE WITH THE WIND, it would have helped the story if we’d glimpsed the Halcyon plantation of JEZBEL in all its glory in Technicolor.
In many ways, though Bette Davis is the star of the picture, the film is an ensemble drama and all of the roles are well-written. Fay Bainter, cast as a supporting player, would net an Oscar along with Miss Davis. As for his part, Henry Fonda takes his role and infuses some charming idiosyncrasies. He is not just reacting to his leading lady, but portraying something substantial.
During the ball, when they come into the dance, the camera shows Fonda’s facial expressions as much as Davis’s. The red dress seems to symbolize the fact that both of them (not just her) are no longer chaste, and that they are the most liberal couple in the community. However, he quickly renounces this as well as the idea of a future with her when he escorts her home. Tomorrow will not be another day after all, dumpling. She is going to have to fight to get him back.
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Post by Fading Fast on Nov 13, 2024 15:56:58 GMT
↑ Excellent review. ↓ My favorite Bette Davis moment in the movie.
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