Cinema: Popeye the Magnificent

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Jezebel. Last week the U. S. cinemaudience saw a crinolined & frock-coated production that cost $1,250,000, an intensely-played, adroitly-directed story, as like to Gone With the Wind as chicory is to coffee. After some badly-drawled atmosphere-setting about the propriety of mentioning a lady's name in a barroom, audiences knew that the girl to be reckoned with would be high-stepping Julie Marsden (Bette Davis), who had turned down a horse-&-hounds aristocrat named Buck Cantrell (George Brent) for one Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda).

That Pres Dillard is in trade (banking) is bad enough, but that he neglects his lady for business is worse. To chastise Pres, Julie wears red to the Mardi Gras' Olympus Ball, where unmarried girls traditionally wear white. To chastise Julie, Pres dances her feet off while proper and white-frocked New Orleans belles primly withdraw to the sidelines. That night Julie's good night to Pres is a slap fully as resounding as that which Scarlett O'Hara deals to Ashley Wilkes to give Gone With the Wind its real start. When Pres goes, Julie is confident he will come back. A year later he does return, with a Northern bride (Margaret Lindsay). With every vixenish wile she can think of, Julie tries to satisfy her longing and her hate. When a duel born of her scheming results in Buck Cantrell's death, even her motherly aunt (Fay Bainter) calls Julie a Jezebel.

But yellow fever sweeps out of the bayous and the people of New Orleans, among them Pres Dillard, begin to drop. When it comes time to remove Pres to the leper and fever colony on Lazarette Island, whence few return, Julie, strong in apparent regeneration, goes to nurse him, while his trustful Northern bride stays behind to pray for their return.

As drama, Jezebel is slender stuff. One red dance frock in a ballroom full of white ones could not ordinarily be much of a shock to a cinemaudience. But by force of personal intensity and able acting Actress Davis gives her emotional crises a convincing importance. In fact she establishes her character so convincingly that few cinemaudiences will be persuaded that Julie's sacrificial fade-out is not just another foxy trick to get her man, dead or alive.

Vamp & Vixen. Ten years ago Bette Davis went to lofty Eva Le Gallienne, looking for a place in her Manhattan Civic Repertory company. Actress Le Gallienne dismissed her saying, "I can see your attitude toward the theatre is not sincere. . . . You are a frivolous little girl." Three years later, after a year with Universal Pictures, she was dismissed again, for lack of sex appeal. "I can't imagine any guy giving her a tumble," pronounced Carl ("Junior") Laemmle, 23-year-old Hollywood producer-genius.

Last week, had they cared to, Actress Eva Le Gallienne, after a lacklustre season of her own, and Junior Laemmle, out of a job at 30, might have seen Actress Bette Davis, with plenty of sincerity and more than a dash of sex appeal, demonstrate that she is well worth the $3,500-odd a week Warner Brothers now pay her 40 weeks of the year.

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