The Little Foxes (Samuel Goldwyn Productions, RKO, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 27) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” all-day tribute to legendary mega-star Bette Davis: The Little Foxes (1941), made at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio in 1941 in what was Davis’s second and last loan-out during her 18-year period as a contract player for Warner Bros. The first had come in 1934 when RKO borrowed her for the bitch role of waitress Mildred Rogers in the film of W. Somerset Maugham’s largely autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, a part Davis had to fight for because the conventional wisdom in Hollywood then was that male stars could have long and prosperous careers as villains – Erich von Stroheim was famously billed as “The Man You Love to Hate” – but the only way a woman could have similarly enduring success was if she only played characters the audience could like. Davis pleaded with Jack Warner for the role of Mildred, and after weeks of fighting her Warner finally gave in and told Davis, “O.K., go ahead and hang yourself.” Davis returned to Warners after Bondage a much bigger star than before, and one of the “suits” at Warners said, “RKO knew what kind of girl she really was!” By 1941 Davis was literally the highest-paid woman in America and, after a nasty fight with Warner Bros. in which she tried to break her contract by fleeing to Britain, lost the battle but effectively won the war, she’d established her reputation playing precisely the sort of bitch roles from which Jack Warner had tried to warn her against. Davis got the part in The Little Foxes thanks to one man: Sgt. Alvin C. York, who had sold Warner Bros. the rights to his life story of overcoming his Quaker pacifism to become America’s most decorated hero in World War I. York’s contract with Warners gave him approval rights over the actor who would play him, and he soon made it clear to Jack Warner that Gary Cooper was the only actor whom he’d approve. Since Cooper was under contract to Goldwyn, the only way Warner Bros. could get him for Sergeant York was to cut a major loan-out deal to give Goldwyn Bette Davis for The Little Foxes.

The Little Foxes had begun as a play by Lillian Hellman, who was working for Goldwyn as a screenwriter under a contract that also gave Goldwyn first right of refusal for anything she wrote for the theatre. The film's title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." (In 1945 the other half of that quote, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, was used as a movie title, directed by Roy Rowland from a script by Dalton Trumbo based on a 1940 novel by George Victor Martin, starring Edward G. Robinson and Agnes Moorehead as a Norwegian immigrant farmer couple in Wisconsin.) Producer Samuel Goldwyn could never remember the title of the film correctly; he kept calling it The Three Little Foxes, perhaps confusing it with the Walt Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933). The Little Foxes was produced on Broadway by Herman Shumlin and starred Tallulah Bankhead as Regina Hubbard Giddens, avaricious bitch goddess of the small town of Paltou, Alabama (called “Bowden” in Hellman’s 1946 prequel, Another Part of the Forest). Goldwyn assigned William Wyler to direct the film, which made sense because Wyler had previously directed Davis in two of her biggest hits at Warners, Jezebel (1938) – which won her her second Academy Award – and The Letter (1940). Wyler advised Davis to go to New York and see Bankhead’s performance as Regina before he shot the movie. Davis originally didn’t want to because she didn’t want her performance to be affected by Bankhead’s, but once she saw Bankhead play the part she insisted that Bankhead’s interpretation was the only possible one. During the shoot of The Little Foxes Davis and Wyler continually argued, always over the same issue: Wyler would say things like, “I want you to give Regina some depth instead of playing her as just a one-dimensional bitch,” and Davis would reply, “But Willy, Lillian Hellman wrote her as a one-dimensional bitch!” They also argued over Davis’s use of rice-flour makeup and calamine lotion on her face to make herself look older and uglier. (One of the big things I admire about Bette Davis is her willingness to make herself look ugly if she felt a role required it.) In one clever scene, Regina looks at an old photo of herself (almost certainly a stock still left over from an earlier Bette Davis film) and compares it to what her mirror reveals of her current appearance.

The film’s screenplay, which Hellman adapted herself with help from Arthur Kober (to whom she’d been briefly married in the 1920’s), Dorothy Parker, and Parker’s husband Alan Campbell, softened the story by adding one character, David Hewitt (Richard Carlson), a nice guy who works as a reporter for the local Paltou paper and becomes the boyfriend of Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright in her film debut) after Alexandra rejects her family’s pressure on her to marry her first cousin Leo Hubbard (Dan Duryea in a marvelously twitchy performance that anticipates the great villains he would play for Fritz Lang in Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street). Regina’s husband, Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall, reunited with Davis from the cast of The Letter, in which they also played a dysfunctional couple), is off in a Baltimore sanitarium where he’s recovering from heart disease. Regina is being pressured by her brothers Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar (Carl Benton Reid) to bring Horace home so he, Ben, and Oscar can put up the money to fund a northern investor, William Marshall (Russell Hicks) from Chicago, who wants to build a cotton mill in Paltou so instead of shipping the raw cotton to New England they can mill it in Paltou and take advantage of the ultra-cheap Southern labor. Regina ultimately sends daughter Alexandra to fetch her father and bring him home so she can get the money from him and invest in the mill that will make all three Hubbards millionaires. Only when Alexandra finally brings him back, Horace is appalled by the proposal; at one point Marshall boasts that the governor of Alabama has given them the water rights needed for the mill to work, and Horace says, “Were they his to give?” (The Little Foxes is studded throughout with Hellman’s and her co-writers’ digs at the evils of capitalism.) Regina continues to browbeat Horace into giving her the money to invest in the mill, and Horace continues to refuse until, in the film’s most famous scene, he has another heart attack and breaks the bottle of his all-important medicine as he’s trying to serve himself the spoonful of it which will save his life. Realizing that there’s another bottle of it in his bedroom upstairs, Horace tries to crawl up the stairs to fetch it, but Regina impassively watches him and doesn’t try to help him until it’s already too late to save him.

This follows an argument between them over $75,000 in Union Pacific bonds, which Horace had bought when they were virtually worthless and held on to as the company became successful and the worth of its bonds soared. Only the bonds, which Horace kept in a safety deposit box at his bank, were stolen by his scapegrace nephew Leo, Oscar’s son, who turned them over to his father Oscar and his uncle Ben to finance the mill without Horace’s or Regina’s involvement. Though Horace wasn’t expected to inspect the bonds until a few months later when it was time to claim his dividend coupons, he’s so disgusted at the pressure from Regina that he contacts his attorney and says he wants to change his will to disinherit Regina and leave all his money to their daughter Alexandra. As part of his plan, he takes the safety-deposit box home with him and notices that the bonds are missing. Horace correctly deduces what happened to them and announces that in his new will, he will declare that he merely loaned Regina the bonds, so Regina will get only the value of the stolen bonds, which will lock her out of any profit share in the mill. This gives Regina a powerful motive for wanting Horace dead, and when he finally croaks she announces to her brothers that her price for keeping silent about Leo’s transgressions will be a 75 percent share in the mill instead of the 40 percent to which she’d previously agreed. Disgusted by her mother’s avaricious attitude and callousness towards her father, Alexandra leaves town with David (in the play there was no David and she left alone) and Regina, in a haunting close-up, is left super-rich but alone and psychologically and morally devastated. (It’s quite remarkable that in a film made while the Motion Picture Production Code was in full force and effect, Regina was allowed literally to get away with murder at the end.)

The Little Foxes was photographed by Gregg Toland, who when it started shooting had just come off of his work on Orson Welles’s first film, Citizen Kane. He continued his work on so-called “deep focus” that he had pioneered on Kane, which meant using long lenses and ultra-fast film to increase the depth of field and have foreground and background objects in focus simultaneously. Bette Davis was appalled at the sheer amount of light Toland was using on the set to get these effects, and became convinced it was his attempt to embarrass her (though this seems odd given that she was simultaneously arguing with her director over a makeup designed to make her look uglier!). Seen today, The Little Foxes seems like a powerful movie attacking the evils of capitalism in general – one of the Hubbard brothers even delivers a speech towards the end in which he predicts that someday people like him will rule the world, which seems oddly prescient in the Age of Trump – and particularly the devastating effects of greed on the people who possess it and use it as an excuse for their actions. My husband Charles and I had watched it before, though on that occasion I had prefaced it with Lillian Hellman’s prequel, Another Part of the Forest (made at Universal in 1948, based on Hellman’s 1946 play), which may have weakened the impact of this quite remarkable film. (Dan Duryea, who played Leo in The Little Foxes, appeared as Leo’s father Oscar in the film of Another Part of the Forest, with Fredric March as Marcus Hubbard, father of Oscar, Ben, and Regina, and March’s real-life wife Florence Eldridge as Marcus’s wife Lavinia.)