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The Little Foxes

The Little Foxes is a 1941 American drama film directed by William Wyler, produced by Samuel Goldwyn, and adapted by Lillian Hellman from her own 1939 Broadway play. It stars Bette Davis as Regina Hubbard Giddens, a ruthless Southern woman scheming with her brothers to profit from a cotton mill at the expense of her ailing husband, and it is noted for Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography and for nine Academy Award nominations that produced no wins.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Source	Lillian Hellman's 1939 Broadway play, in which Tallulah Bankhead played Regina; the production ran 410 performances³
Setting	The deep South in the year 1900, announced by an onscreen prologue; the title comes from the Song of Solomon II.15, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines"¹
Principal cast	Bette Davis (Regina), Herbert Marshall (Horace), Teresa Wright (Alexandra), Richard Carlson (David Hewitt), Dan Duryea (Leo), Patricia Collinge (Birdie), Charles Dingle (Ben), Carl Benton Reid (Oscar)¹
Key crew	Director William Wyler; producer Samuel Goldwyn; cinematographer Gregg Toland; editor Daniel Mandell; art director Stephen Goosson; costumes Orry-Kelly; music Meredith Willson¹
Release	New York opening 20 August 1941 per AFI; general release 29 August 1941; 115-116 minutes, black and white, distributed by RKO Radio Pictures¹
Academy Awards	Nine nominations at the 1942 ceremony, including Best Picture, Directing, Actress, and two Supporting Actress nominations, with no wins⁴
Later versions	Marc Blitzstein's opera Regina (1949) and an NBC Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcast starring Greer Garson (1956)⁵

Spoilers

Plot

In the deep South of 1900, Regina Giddens prepares a dinner for William Marshall, a wealthy Chicago industrialist considering a cotton mill in her small town. Her brothers, the shopkeepers Ben and Oscar Hubbard, need US$75,000 from Regina to join the deal, and the family also schemes to marry Regina's daughter Alexandra to Oscar's son Leo.¹^•⁶

Regina summons her estranged husband Horace, who has been living in Baltimore because of heart trouble, expecting him to lend the money. Horace refuses to participate in the mill scheme, so Leo, who works at a bank, steals Horace's railroad bonds from his safe-deposit box to fund the investment, shutting Regina out of the deal.⁶^•⁷ When Horace learns of the theft, he tells Regina he will declare the bonds a loan, which would leave her without a share; he suffers a fatal heart attack before he can act. In the film's most famous scene, Regina sits impassive in the foreground while Horace, begging for his medicine, collapses on the staircase behind her, and her deliberate inaction allows him to die.⁷^•⁸ Regina then uses her knowledge of the theft to blackmail her brothers into a seventy-five percent share of the business. Alexandra, realizing what her mother has done, leaves her; Regina ends wealthy but alone.⁷

From stage to screen

Samuel Goldwyn purchased the rights to Hellman's play in January 1940 on a sliding scale based on the picture's gross. According to Goldwyn's biography, he felt the character of Regina was too venomous to arouse audience identification, and Hellman responded by inventing the newspaperman David Hewitt as a love interest for Regina's daughter Alexandra. After Goldwyn called for further revisions, Hellman suggested her friends Arthur Kober, Alan Campbell, and Dorothy Parker for additional scenes and dialogue.¹

The added character changed the story's shape. David serves as a moral commentator on the family's conflicts, strengthens Alexandra's role, provides moments of levity, and acts as a conduit between the Hubbard-Giddens household and its Black servants, giving characters such as Cal and Addie scenes of their own. Hellman approved of the changes, saying that "most of The Little Foxes, a good fifty percent, is done better in the picture than it ever was in the play."⁹ A scholarly survey of the play's versions notes that the film's new character and resulting different ending are unusual among American plays adapted to film.¹⁰

Five actors reprised their roles from the original Broadway production: Patricia Collinge, Charles Dingle, Carl Benton Reid, Dan Duryea, and John Marriott, all making their screen debuts alongside newcomers Teresa Wright and Jessie Grayson.¹¹

Production

To secure Bette Davis from Warner Bros., Goldwyn offered to trade Gary Cooper, who was under contract to him, for a one-picture deal. Warner Bros. accepted and cast Cooper in Sergeant York; the loanout was Davis's only one from Warner Bros. until her contract expired in 1949.¹

Davis and Wyler. According to Davis's autobiography, she strongly disagreed with Wyler over the interpretation of Regina. Wyler preferred to soften the character, while Davis argued for a harsher presentation closer to Tallulah Bankhead's Broadway portrayal. In June 1941, The New York Times reported that Davis withdrew from the film over these disagreements and returned to the set after a twenty-one day absence.¹ The pairing proved to be the last between director and star, after Jezebel (1938) and The Letter (1940).¹² The conflict extended to wardrobe: Wyler wanted Davis dressed in the height of Gibson-era fashion for the 1900 setting, while Davis and costume designer Orry-Kelly agreed that Regina's clothes would have "a certain worn out look from a few years back."¹¹

Locations and sets. Production ran from 28 April to 3 July 1941. All filming took place on the studio lot except exterior shots at the Belle Helene Plantation near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Where the Broadway play had been confined to a living room, Wyler worked on an entire six-house village square built inside a soundstage.¹^•¹¹

Style

Gregg Toland, fresh from his work on Citizen Kane the same year, employed the same deep-focus technique, holding foreground and background sharp within a single shot. The murder of Horace happens entirely inside one unbroken composition, with Regina sharp and upright in the foreground while Horace collapses out of focus behind her. Set decorator Howard Bristol and Toland also built a pattern of shots in which Regina is framed between parted curtains, and the final shot closes in on her face between curtains, underscoring the solitude left after her scheming succeeds.¹³^•¹¹

Thematically, the film anatomizes greed and its corrosion of family: the Hubbards' cotton-mill deal with Northern capital stands for an extractive New South rising over the decaying planter gentility embodied by Birdie, and Regina's ruthlessness is tied to her exclusion, as a woman, from direct inheritance.²

Reception and legacy

The film premiered at Radio City Music Hall on August 21, 1941, to a record opening-day audience of 22,163 and critical acclaim; AFI's catalog separately records a New York opening date of August 20, 1941.¹¹^•¹ At the 14th Academy Awards, honoring films of 1941, it was nominated for Best Picture, Best Directing (Wyler), Best Actress (Davis), Best Supporting Actress for both Patricia Collinge and Teresa Wright, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction (Black-and-White), Best Film Editing, and Best Music Scoring of a Dramatic Picture, winning none in a year dominated by Wyler's own How Green Was My Valley.⁴^•²

The story continued in other media. Hellman wrote a prequel play, Another Part of the Forest, which she directed on Broadway in 1946 and which was filmed in 1948; in it, Patricia Neal played the younger Regina. Marc Blitzstein premiered the opera Regina in 1949, introducing a character from the prequel to show Regina's evolution, and NBC broadcast a Hallmark Hall of Fame television version starring Greer Garson in 1956.⁵^•¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Films based on stage plays

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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