A Film Canon

 

 

With The Little Foxes, Wyler perfects his vision of sickly, semi-incestual domesticity, presenting a trio of siblings determined to keep the dividends of a business deal 'within the family', to which end they conspire to marry off their children (just as their grandparents were first cousins), and jealously exclude their spouses; or, more accurately, relegate them to a pathological isolation, variously figured as alcoholism, hysteria and heart disease. At the head of this coven is Regina (Bette Davis), who reigns from her landing, the only space in her expansive Southern mansion that isn't suffocated with objects, thereby inducing the most marked use of the debilitating staircase in any of Wyler's films since Jezebel. Although Regina's insatiable greed is a thinly veiled yearning for a girlhood she never had, she nevertheless exudes a degree of adulthood that is unusual for Davis' villains, rendering her acts all the more chilling, and her imperious commands all the more compelling. That said, she fails to prompt any sympathy, as do most of the exchanges around which the narrative is structured, producing a pervasive coldness that finds supreme expression in Wyler's most memorable use of deep-focus to date, to choreograph a scene in which preventable death is occurring in the foreground, and utter indifference in the background. The result is a nexus between the prescriptive aesthetic of a moral narrative, and the descriptive aesthetic of an amoral narrative, epitomised by the extent to which the few morally upright characters remain peripheral, even at their death or departure, the two moments that would seem most conducive to some kind of heroic confrontation. Similarly, the temptation to contain this behaviour as the symptom of a disaffected Southern bourgeoisie is offset by Regina's brother's penultimate prophecy -  "We'll own this country some day...they won't try to stop us" - while the most resonant announcement of any kind is her own: "I hope you die soon...I'll be waiting for you to die."