Popular understanding has it that Bette Davis was angry with Warner Brothers for refusing to loan her out to David O. Selznik for Gone With the Wind, so they gave her this, another tale of the Old South. She must have been satisfied, especially after she won her first of four Oscars playing the Coquettish Julie, whose machinations to win back her old beau lead to the death of another suitor who couldn't escape the system of etiquette and honor that led to dueling and other barbaric practices. She realizes her folly but not the folly of the system, and thus achieves personal redemption while justifying the system that ruined everyone's lives.

Davis plays Miss Julie, a willful and hotheaded woman who is engaged to Henry Fonda's Preston. She expects everyone to do her bidding; she barges into a meeting he's trying to hold at the bank where he works because she wants him to go with her to choose her dress for an upcoming ball. Her rebelliousness gets the better of her, though. After insisting on buying a flaming red dress to wear to a white dress only party, she is mortified when Fonda forces her to stay and dance with him while the rest of the attendees at the party look on in horrified silence. (One wonders why Warner's didn't film this in Technicolor, since the effect of the red dress is a little lost on audiences.) He does it to teach her a lesson—there are consequences to her machinations. Then he dumps her and moves back up North. She vows to wait for him so she can apologize.

A year later finds her still waiting, and Louisiana in the grips of a deadly outbreak of yellow fever. The city had ignored Fonda's suggestion that they drain the swamps, thus reducing the mosquito population that spreads the fever. No, they are still in the grips of pre-germ theory, and they thought that the fever was spread by bad air that could be expelled by firing cannons. Fonda brings a surprise with him, one that Davis never expected: a wife (Margaret Lindsay). She sets her sights on winning him back from the woman she sees as a weak-willed Northerner, leading to disastrous consequences.

I try to understand that the racist portrayals of blacks in these older movies were more acceptable at the time, but it seriously detracts from an otherwise good movie to see examples of obvious stereotyping that were only included to provoke a laugh from the audience. I just can't forget how damaging the early cinema's presentation of mammies and Uncle Toms, all happy to be slaves, was to African Americans. At least in this film we have two characters, Preston and Amy, who disagree with the slave system, and the overall slant of the entire movie is a sort of half-hearted indictment of the Old South's code of ethics that was rooted in slavery. As a friend of mine said when watching a different movie about a similar place, "I hate the South." This movie was too busy being Hollywood to buck the system too much.