The Little Foxes (1941)

The Little Foxes
Directed by William Wyler
Written by Lillian Hellman, additional scenes and dialogue by Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell
1941/USA
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Repeat viewing/Warner Home Video DVD

Regina Giddens: I was lonely when I was young. Not in the way people usually mean. I was lonely for all the things I wasn’t gonna get.

This is a great film that should be on everyone’s Movies I Should See Before I Die list.

The story takes place in the Deep South in the year 1900.  The Hubbards produced a litter of “little foxes”, always out for themselves.  Ben, the eldest brother, is the ring leader.  He has put together a deal with a Northern cotton mill owner to build a mill in his home town in exchange for $225,000, low wages, and abundant water provided courtesy of a bribe to the governor.  Younger brother Oscar is on board, too.  The brothers need $75,000 from their sister Regina’s husband Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall).  Regina (Bette Davis) is perhaps the most ruthless of the bunch.  She bargains for a 40% share to be taken from Oscar’s share on the understanding that his son, the shiftless Leo (Dan Duryea), will marry their daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright).

The catch is that Regina must convince her emotionally estranged husband to invest his money and he is in a Baltimore hospital recovering from a heart attack.  She knows his weak spot and sends Alexandra to fetch him home.

Horace returns home tired and ill, unable to exert himself enough to walk.  He has no appetite whatsoever for the investment.  But the siblings all have their own wicked ways of getting what they want. With Patricia Collinge in a heartbreaking performance as Oscar’s browbeaten, gentle wife Birdie and Richard Carlson as Alexandra’s free-thinking sweetheart David.

Wyler does such a fabulous job that one would never guess the film’s stage origins.  I just love the natural but intricate way he blocks groups of people.  The film looks splendid, too, amply deserving all those Oscar nominations.  If there had been a Best Costume Design award in 1941, this film would have been a shoe-in.

But it is the acting that is the true glory of the film.  I haven’t seen all of Bette Davis’s films yet but I am confident that she was never better than in this one.  She is like a harder, older version of Jezebel who married the Henry Fonda character and set about making his life miserable.  All the other actors rise to match her fire.

The Little Foxes was nominated for nine Academy Awards: Best Picture; Best Director; Best Actress; Best Supporting Actress (Collinge); Best Supporting Actress (Wright); Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black and White; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Meredith Wilson) .

Trailer – cinematography by Gregg Toland