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Directed by William Wyler
Written by Lillian Hellman, from her play
Starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright, Richard Carlson
USA, 1941
Not Rated (some mature themes, PG-equivalent)
MAJESTIC HEIGHTS AND BITTER LOWS, AND THE ART OF BETTE DAVIS AND GREGG TOLAND
That late, great director William Wyler of Ben-Hur fame directed quite a forgettable piece in 1941 called The Little Foxes. It was revered at the time, called a "mature" work, but its theme of greed has been so frequent in cinema, and the film, based on a Lillian Hellman stage hit, leaves such a puny impression on money-lust, that I can hardly call it more than a minor classic. And how, you ask, can any film starring the late, great Bette Davis (in my eyes, one of the two or three greatest Hollywood actresses the world has ever known) be anything but unforgettable? I answer by saying that she is one of the mere two things that are unforgettable in this film, just as she was the only thing worth remembering in Of Human Bondage. Davis and the simply shocking work of cinematographer Gregg Toland are the only things worth mentioning from this movie.
It never matters what role Bette Davis is in; she has a presence that compels and haunts you, and she can knock you down with one look. Here she is the flaming viper Regina Giddens, a greedy, ambitious Southern woman whose husband won’t supply the money for her to invest in a business with her also-greedy brothers (Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid.) She longs for the death of her ailing husband, Horace (played by Herbert Marshall with rather tedious nobility), and succeeds in killing him by refusing to get him the medicine he needs for his heart. Regina steps on her brothers, her daughter (a rather pathetic Teresa Wright in her film debut), and others, and she shows no remorse, even when her daughter runs off with a dashing newspaper writer when she discovers the wicked back-stabbing going on in the family. (The writer is played by Richard Carlson, whose performance isn’t great, but isn’t without a good amount of charm.) Just like Regina, Bette Davis, in her choosing of roles, couldn’t be bothered with tenderness and sap. She was never anything less than sophisticatedly bitchy, and proud of it, but she was always human.
Tallulah Bankhead originally played Regina on the stage, and you can just imagine her in the film. She and Bette Davis have that ability to let their fiery lingo cascade like bullets; they make the simple act of talking their own special art form. I believe Davis was influenced much by Bankhead; the two drip with Southern haughtiness and aristocratic airs, even though Davis was not born in the south. Even when her character was suffering and poor, Davis still gave her an attitude and independence. Many say her legendary performance as Margot Channing in All About Eve has traces of Tallulah, and I agree. I also think the two women’s f-you sensibility can be found in Angela Lansbury’s nastier roles in The Harvey Girls and maybe even in The Manchurian Candidate. Davis was a very independent woman and artist and helped to knock the studio-contract system to pieces (with the help of Olivia deHavilland) in her heyday.
Regina is also powerful and independent, and The Little Foxes is almost like a nightmarish fantasy of the independent woman. Just when you think Lillian Hellman is against women’s lib, she shows us the other extreme with Birdie (Patricia Collinge), the wilted wallflower who is Regina’s sister-in-law. Collinge reprised her role as this sad, miserable woman whose ruthless husband keeps telling to shut up, and her performance is the opposite of Davis’. It is frail, not to mention not as good. Collinge seems uncomfortable in her 1900’s getup, but she has effective moments when you think her character’s just going to fall apart.
Gregg Toland, one of the revolutionaries in his field, does, I think, one of the greatest jobs of cinematography I have ever seen here. His work on The Little Foxes is not as showy as his influential accomplishment in Citizen Kane, but it is equally startling. The highlight of his work here is his angles. Everything is perfectly framed and captured, and we see the relationships between the characters. This is aided by that winding staircase in the movie’s set, from which many of the best shots are filmed. Many times we see the camera looking directly up or down, suggesting the world of The Little Foxes is one of respect and fear, and secrecy and belittlement, one of extremes. If you look at every shot as it is, they can floor you, because the genius of Toland is exhibited and he knows just where to put the camera. We see great battles being fought in the foreground, and can also see important activity in the background (a good example is the shot in which Horace is climbing the stairs to get his needed medicine.) There is also a superb use of shadows, most obviously shown in a shot where Horace is arguing with Regina, and we see him and Regina’s silhouette in the frame. Toland captures all the intricate nuances of this movie’s world, and I think the overall look of The Little Foxes is strikingly similar to Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons made a few years later, an uneven film whose only qualities were some great directing touches by Welles, a spellbinding Agnes Moorehead performance, and, like The Little Foxes, its capturing an entire aura of a faded aristocratic world. The distinct use of the camera in The Little Foxes makes it powerful not in a stagy, but a cinematic way.
The Little Foxes seems simplistic today, though completely benign and quite all right, and its rather childish view of good-and-bad characters and the ‘inherited’ genes of greed in second generation carpetbaggers is boring. The accusations of blatant racism are unwarranted; whether or not the filmmakers were bigots is not an issue, because the film only shows the details of a time period, and shows its black characters realistically, as only what they were allowed to be at the beginning of the twentieth century. But The Little Foxes lacks vitality, that "spirit" that Regina is always talking about. Davis supplies the presence and Toland the ingenuity, but the most important thing- the story- is what we eventually forget. That Bette Davis and Gregg Toland can take mediocrity, make it worth watching, and display some of their best work with it is the justification for their status of royalty among the artists of film.
By Andrew Chan
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