The Little Foxes

“Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” 

-Song of Solomon 2:15

This verse of Old Testament scripture provides the title for Lillian Hellman’s 1939 stage play, The Little Foxes, a drama about corruption and tragedy in a family living in 1900s Alabama. Greed and deception run rampant throughout the play, as does contempt and hatred. Tallulah Bankhead starred in it and made for a formidable leading lady, the matriarch of a family forced to fight for her survival due to the contempt she was given by her two brothers. While this characterization was strong, and Bankhead did a wonderful job at playing up this dynamic, when it came time to translate this story to the big screen, actress Bette Davis wanted to take it a very different direction. 

Director William Wyler didn’t want to work with Tallulah Bankhead when he was given the reins for the movie adaptation of The Little Foxes. Bankhead had been in movies before but had not made a successful go at it at this point in her career, and Wyler was envisioning a bigger box-office draw for his film. His idea was to cast Bette Davis, whom he’d previously worked with on Jezebel and The Letter, both commercial and critical successes. Bette Davis was on contract with Warner Bros., and that studio initially didn’t want to lend her out. When a deal was finally struck, it came at a hefty price. She took home $3,000 a week while Warner Bros. was paid $385,000 for lending her out. When she found out just how lucrative this was for the studio, Bette demanded and ultimately received a share of that money. Bette Davis was a shrewd businesswoman who knew her worth to the Warners. 

She also knew what she wanted out of the character she signed up for, even if it went against the nature of the character as written. She envisioned her role to be far more cold and calculating than what was on the page, and she went to bat for that. This caused tensions between her and Wyler, who wanted to stay more true to the source material. Davis also insisted on her own makeup artist to ensure that her interpretation of the character was matched with her appearance on screen. Ultimately, Davis won out and was allowed to make her character, Regina, the way she wanted to. It works for this movie, and Davis was nominated once again for an Academy Award for her performance. She ultimately lost out to Joan Fontaine for Suspicion. In the end, while The Little Foxes earned nine Oscar nominations, it lost every single one of them. 

From the Broadway show, Charles Dingle, Carl Benton Reid, Dan Duryea, and Patricia Collinge all reprised their roles for the film. In addition to that, a new role was created, David (Richard Carlson). This was to add an additional sympathetic male character to the mix alongside Horace, the patriarch of the family. David serves as not only a good, decent male figure but a love interest for Regina’s daughter, Alexandra “Zannie.” This addition is a brilliant move on the part of the filmmakers,  who needed an element of romance in an otherwise cold and dark feature. Their relationship is that one little spark of light in an otherwise dark narrative.

The story focuses on the Hubbard family in Alabama at the turn of the century. Regina Hubbard Giddens (Bette Davis) is the matriarch, raising her daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright) on her own while her husband stays in Baltimore recuperating from a heart condition. Regina’s two brothers, Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar (Carl Benton Reid), arrange for a meeting with a prominent Chicago businessman with the idea of building a cotton mill in their little town where they can take advantage of the low wages the recently freed slaves would command. The plan seems to be accepted but will require a good amount of capital to get on the way, capital that only Regina’s husband has available. In exchange for this, she demands a forty-percent share in the business and plans to relocate to Chicago with her daughter to enjoy the profits of the business.

She sends Alexandra to Baltimore to fetch her husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall), with the intent of convincing him to go in on the venture. But when he arrives home, he has no interest in investing in a business that will bring hardship to the workers. Undeterred, the two brothers have a backup plan. Leo (Dan Duryea), the dim-witted son of Oscar, works at the bank where Horace keeps a safe deposit box which includes $90,000 worth of railroad savings bonds. They can “borrow” the bonds for collateral to get the business going and return them before Horace notices they are gone.  Since Horace only looks inside the box every six months, they feel their theft will go unnoticed until they have the bonds back in place.

But Horace has decided to update his will, taking into account his wife’s determination to pressure him into financing a venture he has strong feelings against. His old will is in that safe deposit box, and it doesn’t take long for him to discover the missing bonds. His only question now is whether Regina was involved in the theft or if it was just her brothers. His confrontation with her leaves him suffering yet another heart attack, this one ultimately fatal.

It would be so easy to fully demonize Regina for her actions in this story. Indeed, some of what she does is horrendous, especially after her actions lead to Horace having another heart attack. She has made it clear to him that she never loved him but married him as an attempt to extricate herself from a life of poverty. But her motives aren’t entirely self-serving. She wants for Alexandra the life that she hasn’t had herself. She wants to take Alexandra away from the South and give her a life of luxury in Chicago. Her methods for acquiring this luxury, though, are anything but altruistic. She also underestimates Alexandra’s love for her father. This paternal love will become a wedge between the two women in the end and leave Regina without her daughter. She still stands to make all the money from her share of the plantation, especially after she uses her brothers’ theft of the bonds to force them to sign over 75% of the company. But, as Ben points out to her, if they can find proof of how Horace had his latest heart attack, they will use that against her and keep the whole company for themselves.

Into this drama is a secondary story about David, a reporter who happens to be in love with Alexandra. The couple has good chemistry together and gets plenty of fun moments to shine, but ultimately it feels exactly like what it is, shoehorned into a narrative that didn’t originally include it. It amounts to nothing and goes nowhere other than to provide Alexandra a man other than Leo, whose father is pressing for the two to marry so he can merge their portion of the plantation through that marriage. There is a wonderful scene late in the film where Birdie (Patricia Collinge), Oscar’s wife and Leo’s mother, gives some real insight into what it is like being married to him and how she drinks to bury the pain. She doesn’t want that sorrow for Alexandra and opposed the thought of her and Leo ever being married. 

Bette Davis, in part because of this film, would often get asked why she was always playing villains and femme fatales. She took this with grace and would point out that that was not entirely accurate. She played a lot of heroines and good characters, too. She was amazing in Dark Victory and heartbreaking in Now, Voyager. But people remember the delightfully wicked roles more because those ones are so much more fun to see. There’s a reason she is so well known for these kinds of roles and why, in the 1970s, Jackie DeShannon and Donna Weiss wrote the song Bette Davis Eyes, a song Kim Carnes made into a pop music hit in the 1980s. Bette could just look at you, and the blood in your veins would start to freeze. It’s so much fun watching her playing the shrew or the bitter and angry woman, ready to stick a knife in you if you got in her way. She was such a well-rounded actress, and she could play these kinds of wicked roles in her sleep, but she was hardly one-sided. 

The film The Little Foxes is a very different experience than the stage play. That has been altered forever by Davis’s interpretation of Regina. Davis has eclipsed what Bankhead accomplished on the stage thanks to the longevity of film, and it has altered how this character is interpreted in the years since. It’s a different interpretation, one that the playwright didn’t intend initially. It makes for a fascinating and entertaining look at three siblings that spend the bulk of the film bullying and backstabbing each other, all in the pursuit of material wealth. The dynamic between the three is altered, but it still works, and this film has earned its status as a genuine classic from the 1940s.

Academy Award Nominations:

Outstanding Motion Picture: Samuel Goldwyn

Best Director: William Wyler

Best Actress: Bette Davis

Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Collinge

Best Supporting Actress: Teresa Wright

Best Screenplay: Lillian Hellman

Best Art Direction - Interior Decoration - Black-and-White: Stephen Goosson and Howard Bristol

Best Film Editing: Daniel Mandell

Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture: Meredith Willson

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Release Date: August 29, 1941

Running Time: 115 Minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, and Teresa Wright

Directed By: William Wyler