Here's a thought. What if your spouse was not your best friend but your worst enemy? What if she was on the take and would not hesitate to do you harm? Let me introduce you to Regina, played by Bette Davis, scheming and badgering her sick and invalid husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall) to get her hands on $75,000. It's for a partnership with her two wealthier brothers in a cotton mill, an enterprise which, by the way, will garner huge profits by using exploited labour. The situation is grotesque.
And it doesn't stop there. One of the brothers, Oscar, is married to Birdie (Patricia Collinge, in a heartbreaking performance) a kind and gentle, but alcoholic, chatterbox constantly subject to her husband's contempt and cruelty. In an early scene he slaps her face in public, an act of such wanton brutality that I involuntarily cried out. Oscar's son (Dan Duryea), a meek and sycophantic ne'er-do-well bank clerk (his name, Leo, is comically inappropriate), is given a task by his dad - "borrow" the $75,000 in bonds from Horace's safety deposit box. Imagine, if you can, a father shamelessly advising his son to steal, not directly, mind you, just in so many words. This conversation takes place in a bathroom where both men are shaving. Their backs are toward each other - they can't look at each other face-to-face - and they see only parts of each other through mirrors, reflecting, if you will, the elliptical nature of the conversation. It's a wonderful, if sickening, scene with inspired direction by William Wyler.
Teresa Wright plays Regina and Horace's innocent daughter, Alexandra, a work in progress. Her boyfriend, David, is a newspaperman, and he loves her with the best kind of love possible - he wants her to become a fully realized person. More specifically, he wants her to grow a backbone and stand up to her mother and the rank immorality that she represents (her mother has wedding plans for her, and they don't include David). Alexandra already knows that she could end up like Birdie. There's a scene where all of the "good" people in the story - Alexandra, David, Horace and Birdie - are huddled in a circle around a table on the patio, as if they are taking comfort in each other, and Birdie admits that she drinks alone in her room. I can imagine that. And I can imagine her unspoken alcoholic fantasies and daydreams, just from Collinge's performance alone.
Bette Davis' Regina is the lightning rod of the entire movie. To say that she is driven is like saying that a hurricane is windy. I happened to catch a few minutes of "The Little Foxes" several years ago and I concluded that its feminist slant meant that, in a room filled with posturing, powerful men she needed to be even more ruthless and cunning than they were in order to survive. I was only partially right. There's a moment when Regina compares the soft, feminine curves of her face in a photograph of her as a young woman to her hardened, angular features in a mirror. In fact, she has to sacrifice her womanhood on the altar of expediency. She will never love again, if in fact, she ever loved at all, for to love is to be vulnerable. The turning point in the movie is the scene when, alone in the house with her husband, who has discovered that the bonds are missing, and is having a heart attack, she does the unthinkable. Actually, she doesn't do anything at all, and there is a word for what she doesn't do. Bette Davis' eyes reveal a chilling determination on the part of Regina, but something else, as well - genuine surprise at what she's capable of. This is the moment, in a horror movie, when the creature sheds its final skin and morphs into what it was meant to be, in all its hideous glory. From this moment on there is no stopping Regina. A couple of scenes later, within hearing range of the grieving Alexandra, even the two brothers cautiously suggest that they discuss "business" elsewhere. However Regina, power-tripping, has the two men right where she wants them and pursues the topic out loud, with a megalomaniac's careless abandon. This is her triumph...and will be her downfall. There's no way that she's likable, but she IS magnificent, and you can't stop watching her. She may be a monster, but Bette Davis reveals her human origins.
This movie held me captive until the final fade-out. The scene when the boyfriend, David, slaps Leo's face, not once but several times, swiftly, elicited a cheer from me. I read that the boyfriend was not in Lillian Hellman's original play but was added to the film version, and I think that was a wise decision. The romance between Alexandra and David was, perhaps, necessary to give this morbid tale of pernicious greed some balance and hope and the wonderful Teresa Wright an expanded part. "The Little Foxes" is a Southern Gothic melodrama set at the turn of the 20th century, and at this writing, is seventy years old, yet it remains as modern, relevant and vivid today as it must have been in 1941. It's one of the great ones.
And it doesn't stop there. One of the brothers, Oscar, is married to Birdie (Patricia Collinge, in a heartbreaking performance) a kind and gentle, but alcoholic, chatterbox constantly subject to her husband's contempt and cruelty. In an early scene he slaps her face in public, an act of such wanton brutality that I involuntarily cried out. Oscar's son (Dan Duryea), a meek and sycophantic ne'er-do-well bank clerk (his name, Leo, is comically inappropriate), is given a task by his dad - "borrow" the $75,000 in bonds from Horace's safety deposit box. Imagine, if you can, a father shamelessly advising his son to steal, not directly, mind you, just in so many words. This conversation takes place in a bathroom where both men are shaving. Their backs are toward each other - they can't look at each other face-to-face - and they see only parts of each other through mirrors, reflecting, if you will, the elliptical nature of the conversation. It's a wonderful, if sickening, scene with inspired direction by William Wyler.
Teresa Wright plays Regina and Horace's innocent daughter, Alexandra, a work in progress. Her boyfriend, David, is a newspaperman, and he loves her with the best kind of love possible - he wants her to become a fully realized person. More specifically, he wants her to grow a backbone and stand up to her mother and the rank immorality that she represents (her mother has wedding plans for her, and they don't include David). Alexandra already knows that she could end up like Birdie. There's a scene where all of the "good" people in the story - Alexandra, David, Horace and Birdie - are huddled in a circle around a table on the patio, as if they are taking comfort in each other, and Birdie admits that she drinks alone in her room. I can imagine that. And I can imagine her unspoken alcoholic fantasies and daydreams, just from Collinge's performance alone.
Bette Davis' Regina is the lightning rod of the entire movie. To say that she is driven is like saying that a hurricane is windy. I happened to catch a few minutes of "The Little Foxes" several years ago and I concluded that its feminist slant meant that, in a room filled with posturing, powerful men she needed to be even more ruthless and cunning than they were in order to survive. I was only partially right. There's a moment when Regina compares the soft, feminine curves of her face in a photograph of her as a young woman to her hardened, angular features in a mirror. In fact, she has to sacrifice her womanhood on the altar of expediency. She will never love again, if in fact, she ever loved at all, for to love is to be vulnerable. The turning point in the movie is the scene when, alone in the house with her husband, who has discovered that the bonds are missing, and is having a heart attack, she does the unthinkable. Actually, she doesn't do anything at all, and there is a word for what she doesn't do. Bette Davis' eyes reveal a chilling determination on the part of Regina, but something else, as well - genuine surprise at what she's capable of. This is the moment, in a horror movie, when the creature sheds its final skin and morphs into what it was meant to be, in all its hideous glory. From this moment on there is no stopping Regina. A couple of scenes later, within hearing range of the grieving Alexandra, even the two brothers cautiously suggest that they discuss "business" elsewhere. However Regina, power-tripping, has the two men right where she wants them and pursues the topic out loud, with a megalomaniac's careless abandon. This is her triumph...and will be her downfall. There's no way that she's likable, but she IS magnificent, and you can't stop watching her. She may be a monster, but Bette Davis reveals her human origins.
This movie held me captive until the final fade-out. The scene when the boyfriend, David, slaps Leo's face, not once but several times, swiftly, elicited a cheer from me. I read that the boyfriend was not in Lillian Hellman's original play but was added to the film version, and I think that was a wise decision. The romance between Alexandra and David was, perhaps, necessary to give this morbid tale of pernicious greed some balance and hope and the wonderful Teresa Wright an expanded part. "The Little Foxes" is a Southern Gothic melodrama set at the turn of the 20th century, and at this writing, is seventy years old, yet it remains as modern, relevant and vivid today as it must have been in 1941. It's one of the great ones.