The dinner party for businessman William Marshall, which opens the play, follows these brief introductory character sketches in the film. Wyler spends some time with the characters seated around the elegant dinner table, as he did in Jezebel. In the play, all the conversations with Marshall take place after dinner in the living room; Wyler, however, divides the action between the two spaces. When Ben contradicts Marshall's assumption that the Hubbards are aristocrats—declaring that they are in trade—Wyler cuts to his first mirrored shot. Ben is still foregrounded in the frame, with Birdie on his right, but behind him, the mirror reflects Regina standing behind Ben, with Marshall in the center and Zan on the right. The framing of Regina here echoes her initial presentation on the balcony and anticipates her framing in the film's final shot. Unlike Ben, Regina plans to take her place in sophisticated society in Chicago, Marshall's hometown. The framing shot, however, undercuts her aspirations, which, significantly, also include Zan, whom she wants to take with her but will lose in the end.
When the dinner breaks up, the camera lingers for a few moments on Birdie and then cuts to the living room, where the evening continues. Regina is centered on the couch, with Marshall to her left and Ben to her right. Soon Birdie and then Zan play the piano for their guest, and Wyler's camera discreetly captures the Hubbards’ idiosyncratic gestures as they listen. This sequence is followed by a scene created for the film: in the kitchen, Addie instructs the other servants to feed some children who are waiting outside. “Feed the hungry,” she says. Enveloping the living room scene with shots of Birdie and Addie, who are humane and charitable people, puts the Hubbards’ callous business machinations in context.
Once Marshall leaves and Regina, Ben, and Oscar are reveling in their triumph, Wyler has Regina walk to a window that is curtained with lace and illuminated by a lamp. She speaks of moving to Chicago with Zan and leaving her brothers. Alone in the frame, in a medium shot with the light and lace behind her, she dominates both her space and the frame—her moment of supreme confidence is realized forcefully by Wyler's mise-en-scène. The siblings then gather to discuss Regina and Horace's unpaid share of the money owed to Marshall. Again, Wyler situates Regina on the couch in the center of the frame, with Ben to the right and Oscar in front, his back to the camera. The most interesting aspect of this shot is that, in deep focus, Wyler also frames Birdie in a chair behind Regina (a reversal of the mirrored shot at dinner). Birdie does not participate in the conversation, but her presence reminds us of a worldview not shared by the siblings. Also included in the shot and behind Birdie is the staircase where Horace (the absent subject of this conversation) will die, while his wife sits on the very same couch.
To facilitate the deal with Marshall, Regina decides to send Zan to Baltimore to fetch her father. When Addie objects that Zan is not old enough to make the trip alone, it is suggested that Zan is old enough to get married. Oscar prods Leo into talk of marriage, and Wyler cuts to Regina as she looks in the mirror. She is obviously thinking about her own failed marriage, also undertaken at a young age. Regina's back is to the camera, and her face is caught in the mirror's reflection—another box, and a frame within a frame. Like many Wyler protagonists, Regina sees that her youth is gone and her life has been thrown away because she married a man she detests. A similar moment occurs just before Horace returns home. The servants are readying his room when Regina picks up a picture. She studies it wistfully and then looks in the mirror. Her reflection, this time at a canted angle, shows an aged, sour, and bitter face. Wyler then cuts to the picture, which shows a beautiful and youthful Regina, her hair in ringlets. By contrast, the mirror's reflection reveals her evolution into a true Hubbard/fox.
The sequence concludes with Wyler's first staircase shots. Regina is first shown on the second floor, lording it over Oscar because she has just negotiated part of his share of the business deal for herself. This scene is followed by one in which Birdie hysterically tells Zan that she cannot marry her son Leo. Oscar overhears Birdie and slaps her. When Birdie cries out, Zan runs from her room to the top of the balcony to check on her aunt. She looks down on Birdie, who seems like a small, isolated, pathetic figure, while Zan is filmed from a low angle and dominates her aunt. Wyler's mise-en-scène suggests that Zan will not suffer Birdie's fate; she will not be crushed by the Hubbards but will prevail over them.
Wyler repeats the mirror-reflection motif to spectacular effect in a scene in which both Oscar and Leo are shaving. Leo tells his father about Horace's bonds, kept in the safe-deposit box at the bank where he works. This exchange takes place in Regina's living room in the play, but the screenplay sets the scene in Oscar's bedroom, where the set-up is solely Wyler's creation. Sergei Eisenstein once commented to Lillian Hellman that he often showed The Little Foxes at private parties and particularly admired the shaving scene, for which Wyler “deserved motion picture fame for the rest of his life.”38 Oscar and Leo are shown standing back to back but speaking to each other through their respective mirrors. We see Oscar reflected in the larger mirror, while Leo's face appears in a small, round shaving mirror as well as in the larger one. The staging unmasks the deviousness and hypocrisy of the family, as both father and son feel like they are getting away with something if they do not look directly at the other. The director, however, is choreographing and exposing their images even as they are manipulating each other.
The shaving scene is followed by one in which father and son stick their heads out their separate windows—more boxes—to see Horace's buggy arriving. Inside the house, Regina sits in front of a mirror, creaming her face (a variation on the shaving cream) in anticipation of her husband's return. All the foxes are getting ready to pounce, but Wyler's mise-en-scène has trapped them just as they are planning to trap Horace and one another. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg criticize Wyler's style in the film as “cold and mechanical,”39 but in sequences such as this, the director's style seems both bold and theatrical as he exposes, traps, and reveals his characters to the audience.
Wyler varies this effect one more time in a tour-de-force shot after Horace settles in his room and is greeted by Regina. They talk and quarrel for a few moments, and then Regina gets up and looks out the window; there is a cut to the arrival of Ben and Oscar, who are framed by a section of the veranda. As Regina looks down at them, they appear small and insignificant. Wyler next cuts back to Regina, who is framed by the window, but on the right side of the screen, framed by another small windowpane, is the seated Horace, looking frail and trapped. None of these men seem to have a chance when subjected to Regina's gaze.
After Horace refuses to join the brothers’ business scheme, Ben and Oscar go downstairs and plot with Leo to steal the bonds. Wyler films their conference in a medium three-shot. Their bodies fill the frame as if they are trapped within it. When Ben announces to Regina that they have the money and do not need her contribution, Regina has already descended the stairs and is on his level. Ben preens for the camera as he exits, a theatrical gesture that is lost to Regina but on display for the audience. The director lets him enjoy his moment, although the earlier framing suggests that it won't last long.
The scene between Ben and Regina is witnessed by Horace, who stands at the top of the stairs—the one moment when he seems more powerful than his wife. He tells her, “There must be better ways of getting rich than building sweat shops and pounding the bones of the town…. You'll wreck the town, you and your brothers. You'll wreck the country.” This speech, which defines the moral center of the film, is overheard by Alexandra, who also hears her mother tell Horace, “I hope you die. I hope you die soon.” At this point, Wyler centers Regina in the frame, highlighting her evil power, while Horace turns his back to her and seems to fade into insignificance, which is the fate of his kind. The scene ends with Alexandra clutching at her father, whose face slowly dissolves into Leo's reflection in the Planters Bank sign. The foxes will indeed inherit the earth.
Next comes the one tender moment in both the play and
the film, as the positive characters gather for the one and only time they are seen together. (In the film, David is included in this group.) The sequence begins with a shot of the staircase; its emptiness indicates that this stage of power has been temporarily abandoned. There is a cut to Birdie playing the piano— an image of the humanism being destroyed by the Hubbards—along with a deep-focus image of Horace sitting in the garden, his body lined up with Birdie's and framed by a full-length windowed doorway. When Wyler cuts to the outdoors, he fills the scene with pastoral images (a stylistic hallmark) of Birdie showing Horace some flowers picked at Lionnet and then a scene of Alexandra in a tree picking apples. At the wine party that follows, Birdie reminisces about the first time she met Oscar Hubbard and recalls her mother's comment that the Hubbards cheated colored people out of their money. Addie responds with her searing statement about “people who eats up the whole earth and all the people in it…and people who stands around and watch them do it.” Horace then recites the line from the Song of Solomon that gives the play its title as he dominates the frame, with Alexandra and Addie lined up behind him. Horace is, of course, one of the bystanders; Alexandra will be the one who absorbs her father's humanism but follows Addie's call to action. As the scene continues, Birdie admits she does not like her own son and comes to the realization that Oscar married her for Lionnet's cotton. She begins to sob as Alexandra leads her away. Wyler concludes the sequence with another meaningful dissolve from Horace's face to Leo at his station at the bank, his face framed by the teller's bars.
The most famous scene in both the film and the play depicts Horace's heart attack and Regina's reaction to it. Bazin analyzes this scene in detail as a supreme example of deep focus: Regina's immobile face is seen in the front of the frame, while Horace struggles up the stairs to fetch his medicine in the background. Prior to that moment, Regina, wearing a black veil over a hat with a large feather, is pictured within a curtained entrance— she seems ready for the kill. Again, Wyler emphasizes the Hubbards’ theatrical nature and how much they enjoy being on display. The framing, however, indicates that the director is very much in control of the action. Horace, who is seated like a spectator, tries to take the upper hand, telling Regina that he knows Leo stole the bonds but will take no action against his nephew. Instead, he will consider the bonds a loan and intends to leave them to Regina in his will; Alexandra will inherit everything else. When Regina seems incredulous about the missing bonds, he insists that she look in the safe-deposit box. When she does, Wyler frames her face in the lid of the box. Horace seems to be in control, but not for long.
Regina retaliates by destroying what is left of Horace's pride, telling him that she has always found him repellent and has used a variety of excuses to avoid having sex with him. She says she married him in the hope that he would give her the world, but he turned out to be only a “small-town clerk.” Regina is thus revealed as another Wyler protagonist who has married for money, only to be bitterly disappointed. As Regina speaks, Wyler repeats the earlier framing of her walking to the window. It is now raining outside—always an ominous sign in a Wyler film.40 However, unlike the scene after the dinner party for Marshall, the front of the frame is now shared by Horace's stricken face. Regina moves to the couch at the center of the frame and reclines, as if she enjoys humiliating her husband. In the play, she boasts of cheating on him to retaliate for his dalliance with “fancy women,” but this accusation is omitted in the film, both because it would compromise the audience's sympathy for Horace and, more important, because it would have offended the Breen office.
At this point, Horace suffers a heart attack and, while trying to reach his medicine, knocks the bottle to the floor. Regina remains immobile, her look dispassionate and hard. She has assumed the role of spectator— though one whose gaze dominates the action. This scene is often praised for its effective use of deep focus, in that it exposes two planes of action at once: Regina's fixed expression, and Horace in the background, struggling up the stairs to secure another bottle of medicine. The scene, however, belongs to Regina, whose inaction remains the focal point, while our view of Horace is blurred. Wyler downplayed the deep-focus aspect of the scene, however, explaining its strategy in purely utilitarian terms: “Now there was another thing about this scene that nobody knows, aside from what we're talking about, deep focus. Herbert Marshall…has a wooden leg and cannot go up the stairs like he was supposed to. This is a kind of secret…a professional secret which I'm giving away here. If you ever see the picture again, he walks out of the scene and a double comes in the background and he starts going up the stairs but he's so far in the background that you can't tell who he is.”41
Wyler effectively employs deep focus again, shortly after this scene. After Horace's death, Regina once again has power over her brothers. Seated in the front of the frame, she dictates her terms to Ben, who is behind the couch and centered, and to Leo and Oscar in the rear, framed by curtains—helpless players in the struggle between Regina and her more powerful brother. Regina wants 75 percent of the business, and she threatens all of them with jail if they do not cooperate. Meanwhile, Alexandra is seen descending the stairs in deep focus. Regina, undaunted by what her daughter has heard, finishes her threat and dismisses the men.
The film ends as the play does, with Alexandra rejecting her mother. Wyler films this pivotal moment as Regina ascends the stairs and Alexandra remains at the foot. Alexandra declares that she will not stand by and watch her mother and her kind “eat the earth.” Regina asks her daughter to spend the night with her, but before she does so, Wyler has her look at the door of Horace's room, and the camera lingers on it. It is a poignant moment that emphasizes Regina's loneliness and fear—a cinematic gesture that expands and enlarges on the literary text. Alexandra refuses and offers a veiled challenge: “Are you afraid, Mama?” These lines conclude the play but not the film, which shows Alexandra leaving the house as Regina struggles to maintain her composure. She manages to assume the steely expression she wore during Horace's death scene, but there is a slight crack now. Wyler then cuts to a curtained window, behind which is a shadow. The curtains open to reveal Regina's face, framed by the bars of the window, as she watches Alexandra and David leave together. Her face becomes engulfed in darkness as the film ends.
Wyler's cinematic ending is a significant improvement over the one in Hellman's script, which has Alexandra telling David that she is going away to learn to stand on her own and fight. She assures Addie, who wants to go with her, that she remembers a song Addie taught her: “You got to live a life of service. You got to live it by yo'sef.” She then asks David if he loves her and if he will wait for her. David replies, “Whenever it is, I'll be waiting for you.” Hellman's ending thus focuses on Alexandra's conversion. It is very much the upbeat conclusion of a political play in which a character rejects the corrupt politics of the present and vows to reform both herself and the world (just as Tom Joad does at the end of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, released a year earlier). Instead, Wyler ends with the image of Regina isolated, alone, and defeated—as he did with Barney in Come and Get It and as he might have with Fran screaming in Dodsworth. Regina is yet another Wyler character who has sacrificed everything for material gain and ended up with nothing.
The Little Foxes finished filming on July 3, 1941, ten days after its projected June 23 wrap date. Its total cost was somewhat over $1 million. The shoot was exhausting for both Wyler and Davis, who fought regularly. Wyler told a reporter for the New York World Telegram, “I'm not knocking Bette for she is a great actress, but I am relieved the picture is done. Maybe she is just as relieved.”42 Davis later told Whitney Stine: “To be happy to have a film with Wyler as the director finished was indeed heartbreak for me. He has never asked me to be in [another] one of his films in all these years. I have few ambitions left—one is to do one more film with Willie before I end my career.”43 They corresponded on and off about the possibility of doing another project together, and in 1947, Davis cont
acted Wyler about directing her in Hedda Gabler, but nothing came of it.
Hellman's attitude was curiously ambivalent. When she first saw the film, shortly before its release, she wrote to the Kobers that it was a “fine picture as pictures go but it should have been better and I think Willy did a bad job.”44 Implying that he was frightened of being labeled melodramatic, she complained to Wyler himself that the film did “not hit hard enough,” was “choppy in the beginning,” and jumped around too much.45 She backpedaled in her letter to the Kobers, however, describing Wyler's direction as superior to anything she had seen for some time. Forty years later, she must have softened even further, for she told Austin Pendleton, who was directing a Broadway revival of The Little Foxes with Elizabeth Taylor: “The one that came closest to what I intended was Willie Wyler's film.”46
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