The Little Foxes - Cinepinion

THE LITTLE FOXES
Directed by: William Wyler
Internet Movie Database Entry for full details

GRADE: A/A- (3.5/4)

1941.

The Little Foxes takes its name from a line in the Song of Songs, by far the dirtiest book in the Bible: “catch the foxes for us/the little foxes/that make havoc of the vineyards.” In the film, the "foxes" are the three conniving siblings, two brothers led by their sister Regina (Bette Davis), and the vineyards are…America?

The aforementioned perfidious triumvirate is scheming a deal to bring cotton mills to their Southern town, but to do it they need investment capital from Regina’s husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall). Unfortunately for them, Horace wants nothing to do with them, as he asserts: “there must be better ways of getting rich than building sweatshops and pounding the bones of the town…” It boils down to the primal struggle between the ravaging avaricious (read: capitalists), represented by the terrible threesome, and the altruistic, represented by father and daughter (played by the insufferable Teresa Wright.)

Lillian Hellman adapted the screenplay from her own stageplay, and at times its theatrical origins show, particularly in its confined setting and frontality. But Wyler, with cameraman Gregg Toland, add a large measure of cinematicality to the production, a perfect example of post-Citizen Kane filmmaking. The power struggle between the three siblings is expressed literally within the frame, with the help of Toland’s trademark deep focus. Characters’ placement and movement on the screen suggests their position of power, not only in a given scene but at any given moment within it. The best example is the recurring image of Bette Davis at the head of a tall staircase, looking down at her brothers. Andre Bazin describes it perfectly in What is Cinema?: “director and cameraman have converted the screen into a dramatic checkerboard…in The Little Foxes…the mise-en-scène takes on the severity of a working drawing.”

While Davis and most of the rest of the cast are phenomenal (it's Teresa Wright’s “I’m just a stupid girl” act that gets a bit tired), the real gem is Patricia Collinge as Regina’s sister-in-law, Birdie. Each character’s behavior towards this timid, mousy, and beaten woman is a litmus test for the audience’s sympathy towards them; suffice it to say the capitalists don’t come out on top. Even more subversive than the caustic critique of American capitalism, however, is that Davis is permitted to get away with a de facto murder, in seeming violation of the Production Code. Is its de factoness a permissible statutory exception?

It’s like I’ve always said, when laden with restrictions, artists, in this case filmmakers, will contrive creative means to skirt them. We ought to reinstate the Production Code to get some creativity back into contemporary commercial filmmaking. -- Henry Stewart

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