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Customer Reviews of The Little Foxes

A Gloriously Atmospheric Moral Fable
Ben and Oscar Hubbard (Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid), their sister Regina Giddens (Bette Davis) and Oscar's son Leo (Dan Duryea) are not nice people. They are a family of profiteering entrepreneurs who have grown to prominence in a small southern town, grabbing the assets of its oldest aristocratic family through Oscar's cynical marriage to Birdie (Patricia Collinge) who has since been driven to alcoholism by his abusive lovelessness. Ben and Oscar's latest plot is to do a big deal with a business bigshot from Chicago who is keen to set up a new cotton mill with them on the understanding that the wages will be extremely low. Ben and Oscar are keen. Regina is keen. But Regina can't come into the deal in her own right: she must persuade her husband to do so. And her husband Horace (Herbert Marshall) is a very different kind of man from her brothers. To complicate matters further he is dying. Meanwhile her daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright) is getting close to idealistic young journalist David Hewitt (Richard Carlson) and, not, as her scheming relatives intend, to the useless and corrupt young Leo.

This 1941 movie is adapted from a Lillian Hellman's classic 1939 play of the same year. The dates make it closer enough where we are - an era when the overwhelming political issue in the USA was whether to join a European war against Hitler. It's not hard to see from this where Hellman's sympathies lie. The movie's theme is the division of humanity three ways: the bad people, the good people who fight the bad people and the good people who just sit by and watch the bad people as they destroy the world; and the clearly articulated thought is that, for good people, sitting by and watching, is not, ultimately, an option.

The movie is a classic and richly deserves to be. The performances are remarkable: notably Davis at her most magnificently malign, Dingle splendidly hateful as her cynical and brutal brother, Duryea as the good-for-nothing Leo, Marshall as the profoundly decent but physically desperately weak Horace and Collinge as the pathetically wrecked Birdie who adumbrates horrifically what, if they are not resisted, her unspeakable relatives might eventually contrive to turn the charming young Alexandra into. Wyler directs brilliantly and the camerawork by Gregg Toland is astonishing in its use of shadowy, long, deep-focus shots. The oppressive atmosphere of hostile emotions running far too high in the southern heat is captured to perfection.

There is certainly a degree of simple-mindedness in the moral landscape of the film. The characters divide rather neatly into two sorts: very good, gentle, decent people and irredeemably evil people. There are no shades of grey, just jet black and lustrous white. And of course the world isn't that black and white. But perhaps insofar as the play is about the issues that World War II was fought over, that is an excusable fault; for those issues, if any ever have been, really were that black and white.

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Bravo, bravo!
The incomparable artistry of Bette Davis, William Wyler's vibrant direction, and Gregg Toland's crisp black and white photography make this movie a must-see. Add a searing and brilliant screenplay by Lillian Hellman (who adapted her own play to film) and you have a true classic.

This movie's subject matter is quite contemporary. People similar to the materialistic and corrupt Regina and her brothers are sometimes found in today's society although maybe not to the extreme of this family.

There are many virtues in this film, but it is Davis who makes this movie unforgettable. I agree with the earlier reviewer that Davis is intoxicating. She is that and more. Bette manages to give the scheming and ruthless Regina sympathetic qualities such as strength, intelligence, and an imperious will to survive. Her Regina will never be a perpetual victim such as her sister-in-law Birdie is.

A woman with Regina's ambition and smarts had few options back in 1900 when this story took place. She could not channel her overpowering survival instincts into running a business or becoming a politician for instance. In those days, women were basically seen but not heard.

And Bette's Regina never pretends to be something she is not. She is blatant about her greedy motives. In the end, Regina is a somewhat tragic figure who doesn't know how to control her own ambition and she ends up.... Sounds like a scenario that does happen in today's society where the acquisition of material wealth seems paramount to decency.

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How to Be Greedy and Mean by Bette Davis
Nobody played coldhearted, caustic and ruthless better than Bette Davis. She sweated acid. One can only imagine what her childhood must've been like. Fascinating on the screen but I wouldn't want to have known her in real life. The movie is just about perfect. Power and money corrupt absolutely. She gains the whole world but loses her soul in the process. A brilliant character study.