Jezebel

Jezebel (1938) is a William Wyler melodrama you can watch online on iFILM, starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. Set in New Orleans in the early 1850s, it is a story about a woman whose pride is sharp enough to wreck everything she loves.

Julie Marsden is engaged to banker Preston Dillard — until a quarrel sends her storming into the season's most formal ball wearing a red dress. In a society where unmarried women came dressed only in white, that choice ends the engagement and drives Preston north. When he returns a year later, he has a wife on his arm and the city is in the grip of a yellow fever outbreak that has paralysed the social order entirely. Davis took home her second Academy Award for the role.

Wyler gives the film an unusual moral seriousness: Julie is neither punished for spectacle nor let off the hook, and Davis plays her as someone whose will is simply bigger than the world she was born into. Stream Jezebel (1938) online on iFILM.