Bette Davis, Classic Movies Mix: "The Little Foxes"

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From Star of the Month, 2019. Davis is the greatest.

"The Little Foxes," (1941): "When We're Rich" scene.

Having just charmed their Yankee investor, Regina (Bette Davis) begins her financial manipulation of brothers Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar (Carl Benton Reid), in William Wyler's The Little Foxes, 1941, from Lillian Hellman's play and screenplay.

The Little Foxes is a 1939 play by Lillian Hellman, considered a classic of 20th century drama. Its 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." Set in a small town in Alabama in 1900, it focuses on the struggle for control of a family business. Tallulah Bankhead starred in the original production as Regina Hubbard Giddens.

The play's focus is Southerner Regina Hubbard Giddens, who struggles for wealth and freedom within the confines of an early 20th-century society where fathers considered only sons as their legal heirs. As a result of this practice, while her two avaricious brothers Benjamin and Oscar have wielded the family inheritance into two independently substantial fortunes, she's had to rely upon her manipulation of her cautious, timid, browbeaten husband, Horace. He's no businessman, just her financial support; although he's pliable enough for her ambition, that ambition has driven him into becoming merely the tool of her insatiable greed. He uses a wheelchair...

Background: Lillian Hellman in 1939. The fictional Hubbards in the play are reputedly drawn from Lillian Hellman's Marx relatives. Hellman's mother was Julia Newhouse of Demopolis, Alabama. Julia Newhouse's parents were Leonard Newhouse, a Demopolis wholesale liquor dealer, and Sophie Marx, of a successful Demopolis banking family. According to Hellman, Sophie Marx Newhouse never missed an opportunity to belittle and mock her father for his poor business sense in front of her and her mother. The discord between the Marx and Hellman families was to later serve as the inspiration for the play. The title "The Little Foxes" was suggested by Dorothy Parker. In 1946, Hellman wrote Another Part of the Forest, a prequel chronicling the roots of the Hubbard family...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Foxes