Watch 'The Little Foxes': Bette Davis As 'Regina' Gilded Age Psycopath; Lillian Hellman Classic

'My streaming gem: why you should watch The Little Foxes.' By Rick Burin, The Guardian, Oct. 21, 2020. Latest in our series of writers highlighting underappreciated films is a captivating and prescient drama with a never-better Bette Davis.



She is imperious and stylish, with a laugh like an open threat and an aversion to mansplaining. She is Bette Davis’s Regina Hubbard Giddens: the sharpest, funniest person in the room. Unfortunately she’s also a psychopath who presages the next 79 years of rapacious capitalism, but then you can’t have everything. After the censorship clampdown of 1934, Hollywood didn’t make many radical films, but the odd one still snuck through: the progressive romcom Holiday; John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath; and The Little Foxes, a visually astounding leftwing polemic that climaxes with the best horror sequence of its decade.

The film was adapted by socialist southerner Lillian Hellman from her hit play, and her politics run through it like the words through a stick of rock. Within seven years, she would be blacklisted as a subversive after telling the witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

The Little Foxes centres on the Hubbards, a nouveau riche family in the turn-of-the-century deep south. They’ve made their money exploiting black people and marrying into the aristocracy. But they want more. And to get it, Regina must lure home her ailing husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall), and either charm or strong-arm him into helping them fund a cotton mill.

It’s at this point you may be thinking that you’re not in the mood for an old, 116-minute film about the funding of a mill, especially when there’s a pandemic on. I would counter these concerns by asking if you would like to see Bette Davis bully a man while wearing a dead bird on her head. Regina is simply Davis’s most irresistible monster. It is a performance of startling physicality, full of inspired adornments: the way she acts down her nose at you, loftily readjusts that towering helmet of hair, or spreads out her arms to inhabit an entire sofa. But that is as much Regina’s performance as Davis’s, an exercise in self-possession, the trappings of a woman who refuses to be patronised...

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/21/the-little-foxes-bette-davis-streaming



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