11. Bette Davis in 'Jezebel' (1938)

Plot Intro

Julie Marsden (Bette Davis) is an impulsive, headstrong Southern Belle in New Orleans, mid-1800s. She’s engaged to austere but handsome businessman Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda). When Dillard irritates her by missing a meeting, Julie decides to get revenge by wearing the whorish colour of red to a prestigious ball, rather than virginal white. Her actions leave her socially ostracised and Dillard furiously breaks off the marriage. But as time passes and a pandemic (how ironic) hits New Orleans, Julie tries to find a way to win back the life she had.

Doug says...

This is, rather guttingly, our last brush with Bette Davis in this project. I’m going to run over the film pretty quickly because I want to discuss Davis, labelled one of the greatest actresses of all time by the American Film Institute, second only to Katharine Hepburn. 

The film is a bit shoddy, and is very much a weak blueprint of Gone With The Wind, released a year later and for which Davis was a popular choice for the main role (losing out as she did to Vivien Leigh). It’s full of big skirts and is a hair’s breadth away from a ‘fiddle dee dee’. The plot also abruptly switches halfway through - from torrid romance to disaster movie - as suddenly everyone is desperately trying not to catch and die from Yellow Fever. It’s a slight jolt writing this in the middle - as we are - of the global Coronavirus pandemic, but it actually helped me understand the desperation portrayed on screen. Faye Bainter as Davis’ aunt is excellent (and won Best Supporting Actress) and it’s an enjoyable if ultimately unbelievable film. 

But Bette Davis is wonderful. The thing that I missed - the Davis thing - from her first Best Picture win, is here. It’s not fully present but it is there, an unfurling of her astonishing screen presence, her willingness to be unattractive or unpleasant, and ultimately magnetic. I’m delighted because my favourite thing about Davis is that she doesn’t let anyone else have the screen. It’s hers. 

One of Davis’ last ever acting roles was in 1986’s Murder with Mirrors, an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel and opposite the also-great actress Helen Hayes in her last ever role. Davis had had a stroke and was clearly struggling, the left side of her mouth downturned. She is frequently sitting during the filming and the bombastic fire of her greatest roles is completely absent. It’s quite a flat performance. But during one scene, as her character finds out the treachery of the people around her, she stretches out a hand to her friend in sorrow, and suddenly the full force of her sheer talent captivates you. Even then - shrivelled, damaged and only three years before her death - Bette Davis retained the magic of a great Hollywood actress.

For me her greatest moment is in 1950’s All About Eve, where at the age of 42, she bounds around the stage with flair and fire, combining the camp with the emotional till you are almost breathless. No one else can deliver the line ‘fasten your seatbelts’ like Davis. It was - to my mind - criminal that she didn’t win a third Oscar for it. But Davis wasn’t proud and would famously take any role. She cared most that she was working. Search her name on Amazon Prime and you’ll see a host of films come up, many that you’ve never heard of. We’ve watched a few and some of them are diabolical - or they would be except for Davis at the heart of it, working her arse off to entertain and amuse - and always succeeding. 

She was also a consummate professional. When working on Death on the Nile in her 70s, she was still always - as she was all her career - the first one on set, the first one in hair and make up and the first one to be line perfect. Co-star and fellow legend Angela Lansbury said that she felt the reason Davis liked her was that she took it as seriously, and turned up at the same time. It mattered, to Davis, that everyone was there to work.

I am genuinely sad that we won’t get to go on the same journey in this project that we will with Katharine Hepburn, checking in with her at various points along the way. But I still have a host of her films to discover independently - hugely well regarded ones like Now, Voyager, The Little Foxes and The Whales of August. 

What would Bette Davis say, I wonder, if she were alive now and saw us excitedly rhapsodising over the joys of her back catalogue? I rather suspect she would sneer, stub out a cigarette, and ask ‘what’s next?’ 

Highlight 

Bette Davis getting into her talent. Joy. 

Lowlight

The sudden switch of the film to being all about Yellow Fever. 

Mark 

8/10

Paul says...

Movie nerds and homosexuals alike may have noticed the strong similarities between this and next week’s Best Actress winning movie, Gone With the Wind. Both are set in the slave-loving, plantation-dwelling South, both feature a young, spoilt heroine who keeps screwing up her life (although Julie is far less heroic and strong-minded as Scarlet O’Hara) and both feature a turgid love story against a dramatic historical backdrop. 

The fact that you’ve never heard of Jezebel (I’m assuming) correctly implies that it’s a sub-par Gone With the Wind. It’s shorter, simpler and, quite frankly, sillier. It starts off very strong, with Davis giving a more controlled performance than she did in her first Best Actress movie (admittedly, she’s playing a more controlled character), and I really enjoyed the way as simple an action as wearing red ends up becoming the crux of the tale. The scene at the ball is magnificently done with turning heads, tutting of lips and glares thrown about, giving a sense that what seemed like a simple prank has escalated beyond control. It doesn’t feel daft at all, it’s intensely convincing. And Davis does a superb job of showing Julie go from triumph to discomfort, while Fonda’s masochistic fury also hits hard.

Jezebel doesn’t manage to maintain this liveliness and the pace slows a lot throughout the second half before culminating in a climax that wasn’t very convincing at all. But it’s helped along by the sort of soaring orchestral music and huge costumes, scenery and crowd scenes that keep most epics galvanised. Plus a lovely performance from Faye Bainter as Julie’s moralistic Aunt, who won Best Supporting Actress for this role. It’s far stronger than Davis’ first Best Actress win, but Gone With the Wind is about to crush it a year later.

Incidentally, Davis got this role as compensation for not getting the role of Scarlet. Although she was never seriously considered, she was the number one actress of the year and a firm favourite among audiences for such a coveted role. Her career remained stable throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s but as time went on even Davis admitted that balancing her turbulent personal life with her perfectionist, hard-working nature in her professional life was a struggle. Throughout the 50s, her films became less successful. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was supposed to be her comeback and she did garner another Best Actress nomination for it, but she never quite gained the same success as in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

But, tough and tenacious as ever, she kept going, usually playing either the lead in sub-standard thrillers (I recommend Dead Ringer, which is good for a laugh) or supporting parts in other movies, such as the successful Death on the Nile. Davis is admirable in that, even in her mature years, she would unashamedly take a role so that she could work and support herself. 

Her rivalry with Joan Crawford is much speculated on. Although the two actresses differ massively in looks and acting style, they seemed to attract very similar roles. They also suffered from their respective daughters both writing “tell-all” memoirs that condemned them as abusive. The veracity of Crawford’s (called Mommy Dearest) has divided many (and we’ll deal with that in more detail when Crawford wins her Best Actress Oscar in the ‘40s). Davis’ (called My Mother’s Keeper), meanwhile, is widely condemned as false. 

Davis worked almost right up to her dying day, despite years of ill health. She died from breast cancer in 1989, and her tombstone reads “She did it the hard way”. 

Highlight

The ballroom scene is tense and excruciating. Drama is better when everyone’s wearing mid-nineteenth century gowns.

Lowlight

A lengthy scene leading up to Julie inadvertently instigating a duel. It goes on so long that the suspense is lost. 

Mark

8/10

10. Luise Rainer in 'The Good Earth' (1937)

Plot Intro

A Chinese peasant farmer, Wang Lung (Paul Muni) marries a young servant girl who works in a grand house called O-Lan (Luise Rainer). The film then charts their lives over a number of decades as they cope wi

Doug says...

Let’s just get it out of the way. The six principals in this film about a Chinese farmer trying to survive in China are played by white American/Canadian/Scottish actors. 

Paul I’m sure will go into this in more detail. From my angle, it’s incredibly wrong, and the yellow-face make up that is evident even through a black and white film is pretty excruciating. This film should have been made with Chinese actors, and the fact that everyone but the principals is of Chinese heritage just makes it more awkward. This wasn’t down to a lack of available actors. 

What makes this more difficult, is that this is a pretty good film. Director Sidney Franklin takes the Epic approach, filling it with huge scenes of revelry, riots and more. The scene when a mob storms into one of the old stately homes is stunningly shot, enthralling and quite quite frightening. The scene when locusts attack the farmers’ crops is similarly epic and disgusting. For Franklin, the very way he makes this film is artful and results in memorable, gripping scenes. It would be much easier to address the casting debacle by simply saying this film was bad. But it wasn’t. 

Luise Rainer too is far far better than her award-winning performance in the previous year’s The Great Ziegfeld. She starts softly, and slowly conveys strength and utter devotion without the dull piety that Janet Gaynor sometimes fell foul of. It’s a great performance, it’s just a shame it’s one she shouldn’t have been licensed to give. It’s the last time we see Rainer in this project, and it’s nice to know she was capable of very good performances. Sadly she didn’t do well in later life, and that is a real shame as some of the acting choices she makes here are sophisticated, subtle and smack of a real intelligence.  

It’s interesting that The Good Earth and Gone With The Wind are both very well executed Epics, and both have issues around their treatment of race. With The Good Earth, it’s in their refusal to cast Chinese actors as Chinese roles. With Gone With The Wind, it’s how the film pictures the plight of black slaves. Both won awards, and both have received praise and criticism in equal measure. 

I’d like to finish by drawing attention to one of the Chinese actors who appear in this. Roland Lui, who does some really good work as the handsome Younger Son, was a football star and talented artist who went into movies. This film was his big break, and he appeared in several films across the ‘30s and ‘40s before going into the army. After WWII ended, he became a salesman before dying at the age of 32 when he fell off a ferry in 1948 in a freak accident. A forgotten actor, and with hints here of real talent, it’s sad to see the promise of what could have been. 

Highlight 

The scenes when a rioting mob break into a stately home are terrific. It’s frightening and chaotic, and the moment Rainer is terrified she’ll be shot for looting is genuinely gripping. 

Lowlight

It’s such a shame they turned away from having a Chinese cast. I can’t help but imagine that if they had, this would be extraordinary. 

Mark 

7/10

Paul says...

As Doug says, this is a problematic one. All the characters in this tale are Chinese and none of the six main ones are played by Chinese or Chinese-American actors. The only Asian-Americans in the cast play small roles, many of which are some of the classic Asian stereotypes. It’s not a huge surprise when we consider the time period of the movie. The previous film, The Great Ziegfeld, featured a white man blacked up as a minstrel which wasn’t unusual at the time, and the Civil Rights Movement was still 30 years away. Asian actors indeed have been given a difficult time historically, often pushed into the roles of computer geniuses, mysterious and cunning villains, or comedic buffoons. The 2018 release of Crazy Rich Asians, one of the very, very, VERY rare occasions when a Hollywood movie features an majority-Asian cast, and Parasite’s magnificent Best Picture win at the Oscars, are stark reminders that even today successful Asian actors usually adhere to a character stereotype or stick to Chinese, Japanese or Korean cinema.

In our last blog post, I discussed Luise Rainer’s meteoric rise and rapid decline after her double-Best Actress win in the late-'30s. So here I’m going to provide more background to this movie, because it’s utterly fascinating.

The Good Earth is based on a smash-hit 1931 novel by Pearl S. Buck. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel and, in 1938, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Buck was an American but worked extensively as a missionary in China in some of its most turbulent years. She actually sounds like a pretty good egg. Although a Christian missionary, she believed in respecting Chinese people’s choices not to convert; she wrote the novel to increase awareness of Chinese culture in the Western world; she battled for Chinese people to be able to live safely and with equal rights in the USA, including trying to get rid of the perception of Asian babies as “unadoptable” in the American adoption system. 

Although many critics say that she succeeded in increasing American sympathy for the Chinese during the war years, other critics disagree. I haven’t read the novel myself, so I can’t comment on that. But it was certainly a popular read because some Hollywood studio threw a whopping $2.8 million at this movie, and it took 3 years to make (an immensely long time in '30s cinema). 

Both Buck and producer Irving Thalberg originally envisioned an all-Asian cast but Thalberg decided not to believing that the white-dominant society of the West was not ready. Sadly, he may have been right. We’ll never know. 

The roles of Wang Lung and O-Lan were hot property in the acting world (similar to the “Who will play Harry Potter?” hype). Interestingly, there were rumours that O-Lan would played by an actress called Anna May Wong. Wong was one of a number of Asian American actors popular at the time (albeit completely typecast), and influential in modelling and fashion. However, the Hays Code demanded the role not go to her because Paul Muni had already been cast as O-Lan’s husband and the Code did not allow interracial coupling on screen (even if the two characters were the same race but the actors weren’t, apparently). So Rainer got the role and Wong was offered the part of Lotus, a tiny, unsympathetic character. Wong furiously declined and the role went to a white actress called Tilly Losch.

Paul Muni and Luise Rainer were the Day-Lewis and Streep of their day, and they had both won Best Actor and Actress the previous year so having their names on the posters would certainly sell the movie. It’s a saving grace that neither of them try to put on a Chinese accent, although neither of them look remotely Asian. Muni himself said that he looked as Asian as Herbert Hoover. 

The Good Earth was a hit. It fits in well with the increasing demand for big-scale epics about people battling political and social upheavals, something which 1930s audiences would have certainly identified with after the Wall Street Crash and during the rise of fascism and communism across the world.

In terms of scripting and story, it’s not bad at all. If the actors were all Asian then it would probably remain a highly-regarded work. It features some stunning set pieces such as a riot in the city during the revolution, and a swarm of locusts ransacking fields of wheat. It has a good pace, decent acting and an involving story, and Rainer is much more controlled and nuanced than in The Great Ziegfeld, her other Best Actress win. But it’s hard to focus on its merits or its shortcomings because seeing white actors pretending to be Chinese, surrounded by many Asian extras, is not only contributing to institutional racism, it’s also just plain weird. 

Highlight

When O-Lan manages to loot some jewels from a ransacked palace, then finds herself nearly a victim of a firing squad, is immensely tense. Rainer does well to show O-Lan’s courage, her desperate looks for a way out, and her attempts to hide her fear that the stolen jewels will be discovered.

Lowlight

I’ll give you three guesses what my lowlight is going to be.

Mark

I’m going to, controversially, abstain. I don’t feel comfortable giving the film a high mark due to it’s strong story-telling and production, nor do I want to just bullshit a low mark to score morality points. I think this is a piece of work that should be treated more as an objective historical record in cinematic and racial history, rather than as a piece of art. 

9. Luise Rainer in 'The Great Ziegfeld' (1936)

Plot Intro

The movie charts the ups and downs of the career of Florenz Ziegfeld (William Powell), his wives Anna Held (Luise Rainer) and Billy Burke (Myrna Loy), and his legendary and magnificent stage shows, the Follies. 

Paul says...

After a lengthy string of small-scale but rather asinine movies, it’s refreshing to have a Best Actress winner starring in a much more lavish affair, albeit one we’ve seen and reviewed on our previous project. My memories of The Great Ziegfeld are of a gaudy, expensive and generally spectacular film, but one that is overwritten, overplayed and running severely overtime at an unnecessary two and three-quarter hours. 

Watching it again hasn’t changed my opinion much although I can see why, in an age when movie production was still quite primitive, an epic film documenting something as visually sensational as circus acts, dancers, big crowds, big costumes and Ziegfeld’s infamously extravagant shows was such a huge hit. Made on a (for the time) astronomical budget, it was also nominated for another five Oscars besides Best Picture and Best Actress.

And whilst it’s enthusiastically acted and constructed, the characterisation remains simplistic, and the plot a bit too pedestrian. Like the Follies themselves, it’s all show and not much substance. 

It did, however, introduce the world to its leading lady and this week’s Best Actress winner, Luise Rainer. Rainer was born in Germany, and had only moved to Hollywood the year before nabbing the part of Ziegfeld’s real-life wife, Anna Held. The Great Ziegfeld was a much-anticipated release, and there was some speculation about her acting ability and whether she looked the part or not. But she enraptured audiences and gained international stardom pretty much overnight. 

Her performance, like most of the movie, is immensely enthusiastic. She’s having a great time playing someone who changes from euphoria to fury at the drop of a hat, even if she is over-acting at times. I suppose this sort of lugubrious, mawkish style was popular at the time, but we’ve been commenting on the comparative subtlety of other Best Actress performances. Perhaps the enthusiasm for the movie and excitement about a new, fresh-faced star is what got her the award.

Rainer becomes the first of two actresses to win consecutive Best Actress awards, so we’ll be seeing her again next week for a much more controversial movie (prepare yourselves). Sadly, however, this led to her career downfall. After two years of immense success, Rainer found that audience expectations had become too high for her to meet them. On top of this, she tired of Hollywood socialite life; her mentor, the famous Irving Thalberg, died suddenly at the age of 37; and Rainer starred in a string of poorly received movies in the late 30s, leading to her being dubbed “Box Office Poison”. 

She departed Hollywood in the late '30s, after less than a decade there. She dipped in and out of theatre, TV appearances and occasional dalliances in movies, but remained very much on the sidelines. She spent her final years living in Belgravia in a flat formerly owned by Vivien Leigh, and died not long ago in 2014 at the whopping age of 104 (in fact, five days before her 105th birthday). 

I remember being relatively negative about Rainer on our previous project. I found her performance to be tediously overdone. In light of seeing other Best Actress winners from the time, I can look on her performance a lot more favourably. She’s a fascinating “flash in the pan” star of Old Hollywood, and a sad victim of the Oscars hype. Her life would make a decent biopic- Meryl Streep is available, isn’t she?

Highlight

The famous phone scene, in which Rainer congratulates her husband’s happiness despite being devastated that she will never be a part of it, remains quite effective. 

Lowlight

The script is over-written. There are various dialogue scenes that go on too long and a quick cut could have made the film a more bearable length.  

Mark

5/10

Doug says...

This is our first of two Luise Rainer films, in two consecutive Best Actress wins by her - a feat only matched by Katharine Hepburn. We’ve encountered this film before in our Best Film project, and neither of us were wildly impressed then. 

Coming back to it, slightly older and not really wiser, I find myself looking on it with a kinder eye. The Great Ziegfeld would have made an excellent ninety minute film. The issue is that it’s three hours long. 

The first hour is cracking - we get going, meet the devilish (but also quite dickheadish) Ziegfeld and see him from his very beginnings, as he tries to market a weightlifter to passing crowds. We meet the singer with whom he falls in love (Rainer) and things are moving at a great pace, with lots of energy. 

It’s in the second hour that we meet our problem. For a solid hour and a half nothing happens. The thing is - and it’s understandable - director Robert Z Leonard is making a film about a huge showy spectacle - the Ziegfeld Follies - and wants to show us how grandiose and over the top it all was. So for ninety minutes (ninety minutes!) in the middle of this hugely expensive film, Leonard pauses the action and shows us musical number after number. He wheels in original members of the Follies (including none other than Fanny Bryce who is the subject of the musical Funny Girl for which Barbra Streisand would win her Oscar a few decades later). He throws ridiculous amounts of money at huge lavish sets, costumes, and more. It’s understandable, but ultimately it ruins the film.

Because we’re not in a hall watching a night of Follies entertainment. We’re here to see the story of Ziegfeld, and Leonard puts that on hold and then inevitably ends up rushing through the whole later part of his life. Within the last fifteen minutes, Ziegfeld marries his second wife, has four shows go live on Broadway, makes a fortune, bets everything on the stock market, loses everything in the Crash, goes senile and dies. It’s so fast that we actually found ourselves laughing as Leonard, having succumbed to his desire to showcase the Follies, suddenly realises he hasn’t got anywhere plotwise and has barely any time to wrap everything up.

Does Rainer deserve this Oscar? No. It is a wildly over the top performance, and even the phone call scene - which I loved on the original viewing - smacks of the ridiculous. She’s enthusiastic as hell, but even just a touch more subtlety would have lifted it. As it is, this is an overstuffed, gaudy film with performances to match. What sets it off perfectly for me, is the fact that Myrna Loy appears in the last twenty minutes of this three hour beast, and still demanded top billing on the posters. It’s the ridiculousness that this film deserves. 

Highlight

The first hour focuses on the storytelling of Ziegfeld’s life and shines for it. It’s such a shame that this focus disappears. 

Lowlight

 The ninety minutes of Follies acts gets wearying after ten minutes. Bad call… 

Marks

3/10