The story goes that Bette Davis was the favorite choice to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. However, David O. Selznick decided to give the role to Vivien Leigh. One of the principal reasons was that ten months before the selection for Scarlett O'Hara was made, Bette Davis had been cast as Julie Marsden in William Wyler's Jezebel, another film about headstrong, arrogant woman living in the Antebellum South. Indeed, Scarlett O'Hara and Julie Marsden could very well be long-lost sisters. Marsden was a vain, selfish debutante who's actions force the man she loves away from him. Both wore inappropriate dresses to social functions (in Marsden's case she wore a red dress to a ball where unmarried women were expected to wear white). Marsden orchestrated this faux pas when her husband-to-be refused to go dress shopping with her because he was busy in a town council meeting trying to figure out ways to prevent a Yellow Fever outbreak from reaching their city. Out of anger at Marsden's spoiled actions, he forces her to dance with him at the ball even when she realizes her mistake. They break their engagement and Marsden locks herself away in her room for a year, convinced that she was the real victim in the matter and that he should be the one to apologize. Of course, after a year of solitude, she begs his forgiveness when he returns, ignorant that in the mean time he had married a Yankee woman. Jezebel is an incredible film that will never get its fair recognition due to its being overshadowed by Gone With the Wind. However, it still remains one of the greatest portrayals of Antebellum South ever committed to celluloid. It's high tragedy borne from the very manners and stubbornness that would ultimately lead to the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.
9/10
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