William Wyler (1941)
Lillian Hellman’s narrowly negative approach is limiting but William Wyler’s expert direction and the mostly good performances make for an entertaining drama. Hellman’s play The Little Foxes had been a big Broadway success in 1939-40 and she wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood version, produced by Sam Goldwyn, the following year. (Hellman’s ex-husband Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell also get writing credits.) Condemnation of the central characters is evident from the opening titles. These explain: the piece’s name, inspired by a verse in the Song of Solomon (‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes’); that there have been ‘little foxes’ throughout human history; that these particular vulpines lived in the American South in the year 1900. They are the Hubbard family, greedy and unscrupulous capitalists.
The Hubbard siblings – Ben (Charles Dingle), Oscar (Carl Benton Reid) and their younger sister Regina (Bette Davis) – represent the incipient industralisation of the South and new money that has married into old. Oscar’s wife is Birdie (Patricia Collinge), whose father was a plantation owner. Regina’s husband Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall) is the wealthy scion of a similar ‘good family’. (Both marriages are mutually loveless.) Compared with the rapacious, arriviste Hubbards, the older order is in decline – as reflected in Birdie’s and Horace’s particular maladies. She, incontinently nostalgic for the paradise of her antebellum youth, at first seems neurasthenic, is later revealed to be an alcoholic. He is suffering from premature heart failure. The plot revolves around the attempts of Ben and Oscar to build a cotton mill, in partnership with a Chicago-based businessman (Russell Hicks). In order to seal the deal, the brothers need Horace to invest in the project too. At the start of the film, he’s in Baltimore receiving medical treatment. When he returns home, his prevarication threatens the Hubbards’ plans.
Lillian Hellman’s political sympathies yield some benefits. Regina, lacking her brothers’ independent wealth and freedom, is presented as in part a frustrated victim of a system of patrilineal inheritance. One or two of the African-American characters prove less inanely content with serving their white masters than was par for the course in 1940s Hollywood (or than seems likely in the early scenes of this film). But Hellman’s antipathy to her baddies is so strong that she won’t allow them, with the qualified exception of Regina, to be challenging or even to be colourful monsters. Ben sparks only occasionally, animated by the pleasure of competition with Regina to be the nastiest member of the family. Oscar is more dimly and repetitively obnoxious. His son Leo (Dan Duryea) is such a fool that he mostly fails even to be objectionable. All three of the actors concerned had played the roles on Broadway but these don’t come across as characterisations that are stagy or stale. Although Duryea overacts, the essential problem in each case is in the reductive writing of the character.
To get the $75,000 needed for the cotton mill, Oscar first proposes that Leo marry Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright), who is horrified by the idea and not only because she’s attracted to David Hewitt (Richard Carlson), a journalist on a local newspaper, whose mother (Virginia Brissac) is Regina’s dressmaker. Plan B is to pressure Leo, who works at the bank which holds Horace’s monies and investments, to steal from the $90,000 of Union Pacific railroad bonds contained in Horace’s personal security box. The deed is done and the mill project can proceed but Horace discovers what has happened and, shortly before he dies, tells Regina. By the closing stages, Hellman has tied the villains of the piece in knots. Regina blackmails her brothers into giving her 75% ownership of the mill business in exchange for her silence. Ben, suspicious of the circumstances of Horace’s death, threatens to blackmail Regina in return. Alexandra, appalled by what she has discovered about her mother and uncles, elopes with David. Regina, now independently rich but completely alone, is terrified by her new situation. Since there’s been no reason to think she’s emotionally dependent on anyone else, this comeuppance would be unconvincing, if not for Bette Davis.
Regina Hubbard Giddens is recognised as one of Davis’s outstanding bitches (The Little Foxes is showing at BFI as part of their ‘Playing the Bitch’ season) yet in some ways it’s an uncharacteristic performance. Tallulah Bankhead had played Regina on stage, to great acclaim, and Davis was supposedly reluctant to take on the role. She and Wyler got on well when he directed her in Jezebel (1938), much less well on The Letter (1940) and even worse on The Little Foxes. It’s possible that the uneasy quality that comes through in her portrait of Regina is Davis’s own but it’s one of the elements that make the portrait finally effective. From an early stage, Davis is particularly striking in shots that show Regina’s face worried or uncertain. We see hints not only of her dissatisfaction but also of her feelings of isolation in gestural and vocal details that seem incidental while the character’s malignity is salient but which give her final outbreak of fearfulness some kind of grounding.
Although she delivers her callous putdowns with flair, Davis isn’t as exuberantly outrageous as might be expected. The gracious hypocrite charm the character can switch on and off is a shade too perfunctory. Davis’s Regina is notorious largely because of a single, chilling sequence – in which Horace has a heart attack, desperately asks his wife to fetch his medicine from upstairs and she doesn’t move a muscle. Wyler and the cinematographer Gregg Toland keep the camera on Regina’s face with Horace relegated to the background, as he stumbles towards and collapses on the staircase. Otherwise, one of the most remarkable features of Davis’s playing is a sense of exhaustion suppressed with increasing difficulty. Regina seems to become fed up even of being appalling.
Herbert Marshall underplays most effectively. His barely disguised Englishness helps reinforce the idea of Horace belonging to a different social order, almost a different race. Marshall’s restraint expresses the character’s and his class’s effeteness. Patricia Collinge (also reprising a role that she’d played on stage) complements Marshall by engaging ardently and affectingly with the desperately chattering Birdie whose husband speaks to her only to shut her up. On one occasion, he dispenses with words and hits her instead. Collinge is powerful as she admits, with a mixture of shock and determined candour, that she dislikes her son even more than she does Oscar. Once Birdie has had her big scene – informing a gathering of the decent characters that she’s been drowning her sorrows for years – the film jettisons her.
Teresa Wright, making her screen debut as Alexandra, gives a taste of what was to come in later films, including later Wyler films (Mrs Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives). Wright is a very able actress and a reliably irritating one. She conveys Alexandra’s petulance and entitlement well enough but her pained sincerity is effortful. The principal black house staff are Cal (John Marriott) and Addie (Jessie Grayson). Marriott, who had played Cal on Broadway, is the more nuanced; Grayson has pep but she’s mechanical. The young, liberal, extrovert David Hewitt was an invention for the film – a means of introducing a romantic element and reducing the deficit of nice people in the story. It’s in devising such a character, for such preconceived reasons, that the screenwriters’ talent comes through. Thanks also to Richard Carlson’s relaxed, likeable presence and ability to make David’s occasional incisive lines count, the result is genuinely appealing.
2 June 2019
