New Play in Manhattan

Jezebel (by Owen Davis; produced by Guthrie McClintic). When in 1853 Miss Julie Kendrick (Miriam Hopkins) returns to her Twin Oaks plantation in Louisiana, after three years gallivanting in Europe, her supreme purpose is to wed her childhood sweetheart. Cousin Preston Kendrick (Reed Brown Jr.). Humiliated when she finds that, tired of waiting, he has already married a demure Yankee girl, Miss Julie behaves without regard for decency or decorum. She inveigles a young hot-head named Buck Buckner into picking a quarrel with Preston, hoping that they will duel and that Preston will be pinked. Instead, Preston's young brother (Owen Davis Jr.) shoots Buck Buckner dead. At this point a touch of speakeasy dialect slips into the Dixie murmurings of Playwright Owen Davis. One of the guests at Twin Oaks looks straight at Miss Julie and says: "You're a bitch."

A convenient yellow fever epidemic enables Miss Julie to contest this rude apostrophe before the end of Jezebel. Preston falls ill and blubbers about her in delirium. His wife is ready to accompany him to a quarantine island, from which no visitor returns alive, but it is Miss Julie who shuffles tragically along beside Preston's litter on its way to the lazaretto while her '"niggers" sing sad spirituals.

A slow but gaudy melodrama of the lavender-&-horse-pistols school, Jezebel is notable mainly because it gives Miriam Hopkins (selected for the lead when Tallulah Bankhead fell ill) a chance to rival her cinema performance as a Southern vixen in The Story of Temple Drake

(TIME, May 15). Three years in Holly wood have taught Miss Hopkins to wiggle her eyebrows, as though engaged in a perpetual closeup. but otherwise her acting and good looks have been improved. There is a sharp flicker of vitality at the end of Jezebel's second act: against one of Don ald Oenslager's superbly romantic sets. dressed in an inverted fountain of white lace, her voice flat with excitement and despair, she celebrates the fact that a duel has resulted from her bad behaviour by singing a gay song with her slaves. The fact that she was born in Bainbridge, Ga., 29 years ago and can still remember her Southern accent has aided Miriam Hopkins to impersonate unhappy samples of Southern womanhood. Since her last stage appearance, in The Affairs of Anatol, she has played in a dozen cinemas, notably The Smiling Lieutenant, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living. Still rated by many as one of the cinema's most blood-curdling sound effects was her scream when, as Temple Drake, she was about to be raped in a barn stall.

Miriam Hopkins made her stage debut in the chorus of the first Music Box Revue (1921). In 1932 she divorced her second husband, Playwright Austin Parker. She has an adopted son. Michael. Her favorite drink is a Tom Collins. Hereafter, she plans to spend her summers picture- making in Hollywood, her winters play-acting in Manhattan.

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