Sins of Jezebel (Sigmund Neufeld Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 10) I picked out a film for my husband Charles and I off our YouTube feed that had cropped up from my algorithm to fill in the time before the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” presentation: Sins of Jezebel, a 1953 non-epic from Lippert Pictures and Sigmund Neufeld Productions that was an attempt to do a Biblical epic on a “B” budget. The star was Paulette Goddard, on the downgrade big-time after Paramount had fired both her and John Lund after the spectacular failure of their film about the Borgias, Bride of Vengeance (1949). The director was Reginald LeBorg, a Gay Universal horror director (he was apparently one of Harry Hay’s boyfriends), though as I’ve joked before as Gay Universal horror directors go, LeBorg was no James Whale. LeBorg was actually pretty good in modern-dress non-supernatural thrillers – he did most of Universal’s Inner Sanctum mysteries and those were quite watchable – but he was wretched in his attempts to flog the Universal monsters through one more go-round and he was even worse here. Sins of Jezebel isn’t helped by the decision of producers Sigmund Neufeld and Robert L. Lippert, Jr. to begin it with a not very well filmed prologue depicting the Book of Genesis’s account of the creation of the universe, or to have it narrated by actor John Hoyt. They compounded this error by having Hoyt actually appear on screen as some sort of modern-dress minister preaching a sermon on Biblical history, and it gets even worse when Hoyt also appears in the costume portion of the film as the prophet Elijah. It also doesn’t help that the writer, Richard Landau, is unable to make Elijah a sympathetic character; he comes across as an annoying bore. Goddard, of course, plays Jezebel, and in the opening scene the rather nerdy-looking Ahab (Eduard Franz), King of Israel, is insisting that he is going to marry the Phoenician princess Jezebel despite the warnings of Elijah and the other Hebrew religious leaders that she, a worshiper of the god Baal, will try to bring Baal-worship to Israel and thereby get the Israelites in bad with their One True God, Jehovah. There are a few good things about Sins of Jezebel; it was shot in Anscocolor and the colors on the YouTube post we were watching were rich and vibrant, a far cry from the dirty greens and browns that dominate most “color” movies today. Indeed, I got the impression that Lippert and Neufeld shot it in color largely to offer competition to such big-budget, major-studio Biblical releases as David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, and The Robe.

Also composer Bert Shefter sneaked some quite good quotes from other scores, including the traditional German hymn “Dresden Amen” used by both Mendelssohn (in the “Reformation” Symphony) and Wagner (in Parsifal) and a theme for Jezebel that’s so close to the one Victor Young wrote for Delilah in Samson and Delilah (also a story about a pagan princess who seduces a hero of Israel) it’s a wonder Young and Paramount didn’t sue. But the overall production design by Frank Paul Sylos looked like he’d copied it from one of those black-velvet paintings they sell (or used to) at the U.S.-Mexico border, and though the film has sound and color LeBorg directs like it’s 1909, with long, static tableau-like scenes and surprisingly few moving-camera shots or close-ups. (Most “B” producers avoided close-ups as much as possible because they took so long to light.) The locations used are also all too familiar from innumerable Republic Westerns and other cheap action movies shot there. The male lead, in case you cared, is Jehu (George Nader), the captain of Ahab’s guards, who’s sent out to greet Jezebel and her entourage in her sedan chair (which the carriers drop rather abruptly when Jehu shows up, leading Charles to wonder how that felt to the person inside) and retinue of courtiers, including her Phoenecian boyfriend Loram (John Shelton), who predictably doesn’t see why his relationship with Jezebel should have to end even though she’s marrying someone else. Jezebel insists on getting into Jehu’s chariot and riding back to the palace with him; she also (predictably) seduces him, pissing off his Jewish girlfriend Deborah (Margia Dean), who’s also Elijah’s daughter.

Jehu gets wind of a plot by Jezebel and Loram to assassinate all the Jewish religious leaders (methinks Landau was sneaking in allusions to the then-recent Holocaust into his script), which he’s able to forestall by showing them a way to escape to neighboring Judah through secret caves in which Jehu played as a boy. But he’s unable to stop Jezebel from ordering Ahab to build a temple to Baal in the middle of the capital, and Elijah responds by praying to Jehovah to stop all rain to the area until the Israelites stop tolerating Baalism and go back to the One True Faith. There’s a contest of the gods in which both Jezebel and Elijah pray to their gods for rain, and of course Elijah’s are the prayers that get answered. Ultimately Jezebel gets thrown off the balcony of Ahab’s palace and the Israelites are saved for Jehovah and monotheism in general. Sins of Jezebel reminded me of those 1930’s exploitation movies that seemed intended to warn people away from the demi-monde by making the demi-monde look too boring to bother with, and the acting (including Goddard, who did well under her then-partner Charlie Chaplin’s direction in Modern Times and The Great Dictator and was surprisingly good in her screen test for Scarlett O’Hara – the best, in fact, until Vivien Leigh showed up – and her horror-comedy roles with Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers, but is pretty miserable here in a role for which she’s wildly miscast), is passable but nothing to write home about. There’s also an odd comic-relief character called “Yonkel” who’s played by Joe Besser two years before he replaced Shemp Howard in The Three Stooges, and you can see it coming.