Review of The Little Foxes (1941) by Paul Z — 03 Sep 2008

The focus is on a Southern aristocrat played by Bette Davis, thus making it a perfect role for her. She blasts a powerhouse performance in the function of a classic presence-driven scene-stealer that, due to being distinctly tough and exceptionally intimidating, appeals to our more unruly sensibilities. It is hard to say whether she creates a character who you love to hate or hate to love: At the same time she is greedy and conniving, she thrashes about for fortune and independence surrounded by the restrictions of an early 20th century social order when a father took into account only his sons as inheritors. Therefore, her greedy brothers, played with convincing coldheartedness by Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid, are wealthy, as she must depend on her ailing husband played by Herbert Marshall for financial support. Though Dingle and Marshall hold their own in becoming renditions around her, they are not and could hardly be any match to her.

That is not to say it is without other performances that do match hers, though the equivalent performances do not quite tone with her propane tank presence. Reid is in effect hateful and loathsome as the brother who has married his wife solely to acquire her family's plantation and cotton fields, showing her cruel disdain, his slandering having ostensibly led to her alcoholism. The wife, Patricia Collinge, is a staggeringly tender and lingering performance. Another deep-cutting performance emanates from another wonderful actress from the era, Teresa Wright, playing Bette's daughter, whirring with inner emotion and love and equally capable of an inimitable quiet disavowed resistance due to her character's obligation to marry her first cousin, the ever-sniveling Dan Duryea, as a means of Dingle getting her father's money!

This is an early effort by the great director William Wyler, who adapts the righteous and noteworthy Lillian Hellmann's somber play into a film in and of itself, employing fascinating visual descriptions and subterranean language without ever intruding. In one tremendous scene in which Collinge breaks down, Wyler films the setting's ensemble in a flat, endwise master shot with the various characters prearranged in slanted angles at a variety of distances from the camera's level surface. Establishing an appearance and thus a feeling of depth, this deep-focus image augments the sincerity of the illustration while intensifying the feeling of the scene. As well, Hellmann's script gushes with humanity.