The Little Foxes (1941)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) If you want to understand why Bette Davis is still acclaimed even decades after her heyday, you can take a look at, well, nearly her entire body of work — but The Litte Foxes serves as an exemplar. Going far past ingenue roles, she here plays a deliciously evil schemer intent on riches without ethical concerns. It’s a remarkable and yet typical kind of role for her, and it hints at the force of character she displayed throughout her career and in the famously troubled making of this specific movie, to tell studio heads and directors that she would not compromise on playing a despicable character. She is by far the best thing about The Little Foxes, an overwrought drama with a solid core that nonetheless drags on quite awhile before finding its footing well into the third act. The various shenanigans played by Davis’s character eventually become deadly, as her intentions are clear and so are the lengths to which she will go to in order to get what she wants. In many ways, The Little Foxes is also an exemplar of a specific kind of circa-1941 cinema—the rich literary/theatrical adaptation, brought to the big screen by a small salaried army of talented craftsmen and taking a poke (within the confines of the Production Code) at a dark odd corner of American society filled with well-mannered psychopaths and greedy arrivistes. But it took someone with Bette Davis to make audiences believe in it.