The Little Foxes (1941) on Netflix
Approved19411h 56mDramaRomance
Regina Giddens wants a share of the cotton mill her brothers plan with a Chicago businessman. She sends her daughter Alexandra to bring home her estranged husband, whose money the deal needs.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.9/1014,351 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
In an Alabama town in 1900, the Hubbard family is negotiating with William Marshall, a Chicago businessman, to build a cotton mill that would profit from low wages. Regina Giddens, née Hubbard, and her brothers Ben and Oscar need seventy-five thousand dollars to join the venture. Regina bargains for a larger share in return for persuading her husband Horace, from whom she is estranged, to put up the money. Horace is in Baltimore for a heart condition, so Regina sends their seventeen-year-old daughter Alexandra to fetch him, telling the girl that she misses him. Oscar has been pressing to marry his son Leo, a bank teller, to Alexandra. Alexandra's friend David Hewitt, a journalist at the local newspaper, urges her to think for herself as she leaves.
Cast
- Jessica Graysonas Addie
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Little Foxes (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Tallulah Bankhead won acclaim as Regina in the 1939 Broadway production, but William Wyler insisted on casting Bette Davis, with whom he had made Jezebel and The Letter; producer Samuel Goldwyn agreed because none of Bankhead's films had been box-office hits.
- Jack L. Warner refused to lend Bette Davis to Goldwyn, who then offered Regina to Miriam Hopkins; when Wyler refused to work with her, Goldwyn secured Davis for $385,000, and when Davis learned the sum Warner had received, she demanded and won a share of it.
- Davis played Regina as cold, conniving and calculating, wearing a white-powder death mask she insisted makeup artist Perc Westmore create for her, while Bankhead had played the same woman as a victim forced to fight for survival.
- The Little Foxes earned nine Academy Award nominations and no wins, a record later tied by Peyton Place in 1957 and surpassed by The Turning Point in 1977, which had 11 nominations without a win.
- The film premiered at Radio City Music Hall, where The New York Times reported 22,163 people saw it on opening day, then an all-time attendance mark for a normal opening day at the theater.
