The Little Foxes

The Little Foxes is a 1941 American drama film directed by William Wyler. The screenplay by Lillian Hellman is based on her 1939 play The Little Foxes. Hellman's ex-husband Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell contributed additional scenes and dialogue. Plot In 1900, in the cotton country of the deep South, beautiful and brilliant Regina Hubbard Giddens struggles for wealth and freedom within the confines of an early 20th-century society where fathers considered only sons as legal heirs. As a result, thanks to their ruthless tradesman father, her avaricious brothers, Benjamin and Oscar, are independently wealthy, while she is financially dependent upon her sickly husband, Horace, whose severe heart condition has confined him to a sanitarium in Baltimore for several years. When the film begins, the Hubbards are expecting a dinner guest, William Marshall, a prominent businessman from Chicago. Ben and Oscar persuade him to build a cotton mill in their town, making them multimillionaires. Marshall invites Regina to visit him in Chicago. After he leaves, she reveals that she plans to move there, taking her daughter, Alexandra, with her. Regina proceeds to drive a hard bargain with her brothers for a larger percentage of the mill in exchange for persuading Horace to help finance it, to the tune of $75,000. She sends Alexandra to Baltimore to bring her father home, supposedly because Regina misses him. Regina and Horace's reunion does not go well: She cannot wait to ask him for the money. He has an attack, and still she presses, destroying any illusion that she really wanted him home. Horace tells the three siblings he wants no part of it.