Bette, Bette, Bette, cold as ice and hard as nails in this Lillian Hellman story of the despicable Regina, grand matriarch of the oily Giddens clan. Set at the turn of the last century in the Old South of happy darkies and their benevolent white masters, an image redolent with the putrid smell of decaying fiction, Regina and her white trash relatives try to lure an investor into building a cotton mill near their land. With the Giddens family able to reap enormous rewards from such an arrangement, the greed becomes rampant as Regina and her two brothers scramble to try and raise their portion of the money. Hellman's story, with additional dialogue from Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, becomes incendiary when Regina's ailing husband, Horace (played by Mr. Gloria Swanson, Herbert Marshall) refuses to ante up the third required for his and Regina's portion. As she rails at him to put up the money, her brothers are scheming to come up with the additional money themselves and cut Regina out of the deal. Regina's nephew, Leo, played to annoying perfection by Dan Duryea, works at the bank where Horace keeps his safety deposit box, and a plan is engineered to "borrow" $75,000 in railroad bonds that Horace keeps there ("He won't miss them. Besides, people *ought* to help other people."). The formidable Bette, as Regina, is looking stylish and intimidating in her Orry-Kelly wardrobe, is masterfully lit, and the camera work is expert. During her tirade, Horace suffers a heart attack, and this piece of business is one of the most magnificently planned shots in all of movie history, with the camera trained on Regina's harshly lit face, and all we see is the staggering and collapsing shadow of her stricken husband in the background. Though he rallies only slightly, Horace discovers the bonds are missing, and his ill-health makes his death imminent, he extracts his revenge on Regina, telling her that he will claim the bonds were a loan, and *not* stolen, thereby removing Regina's leverage against her brothers and losing any possibility of profiting from the sordid arrangement. But he dies before this can happen and Regina winds up triumphantly, blackmailing her brothers, and "acquiring" 75% of the business. Ideally, this will bring solace to her, as she loses everything else her husband is dead, her daughter has abandoned her, and she is, figuratively speaking, left being the biggest shark in a pool infested with them. Dazzling and chilling, and a monument of storytelling, film-making and acting.
Review of The Little Foxes
