The Little Foxes Literature Ladder

Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. Bible: Song of Solomon

Rung One: Quotes…Explain the significance of seven of the following quotes in the context of the play—what larger meaning do these quotes have… what is the subtext of each of these statements?

1. Oscar: “My wife is a miserable victim of headaches.”

2. Ben: “That’s cynical. Cynicism is only an unpleasant way of saying the truth.” Oscar: “People ought to help other people. But that’s not always the way it happens. And some sometimes you got to think of yourself.

3. Horace: “Sure. And they’ll take less than that when you get around to playing them off against each other. You can save a little money that way, Ben. And make them hate each other just a little more than they do now.

4. Regina: “I hope you die. I hope you die soon. I’ll be waiting for you to die.”

5. Horace: “You tell Mander that Mr. Horace says he’s much obliged to him for bringing the box, it arrived all right.”

6. Horace: “I’ll fix it so they can’t stop you when you’re ready to go. You’ll go, Addie?

7. Ben: “There are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country. All their names aren’t Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will own this country some day. We’ll get along.”

8. Regina: “If I don’t get everything that I want I am going to put all three of you in jail.”

9. Alexandra: “You only change your mind when you want to. And I won’t want to.”

Rung Two: Personal Connection: Clearly, the predominate theme of this play is greed. After reading the following article, in a two-page, double-spaced informal essay tell me about an example of greed among your acquaintances, friends, or family. Provide specific details that make the story come alive.

America's Disease is Greed

by Andrew Greeley

The most serious spiritual problem in the country today is reckless and untrammeled greed. Greed caused the disgraceful corporate scandals that fill our newspapers. Greed is responsible for crooked cops and crooked politicians. Greed causes the constant efforts to destroy unions that protect basic worker rights.

Greed has produced rash tax cuts that have given money to the rich and in effect taken it away from the poor. Greed has led to the immigration policy in which hundreds of poor men and women die every year as they struggle across the desert for the jobs that El Norte promises them. Greed accounts for the efforts to take profitability out of the pensions and health insurance of working men and women. Greed is responsible for the fact that so many Americans have no health insurance and the fact that the recent reform of Medicare was a fraud. Greed causes newspapers to overestimate their circulation.

Greed is responsible for the obscene salaries of CEOs. In the '90s the ratio of CEO compensation to average workers' compensation was 250 to 1, meaning that the boss earned on his first day of work during a year as much as the worker did in a whole year. In European countries the ratio is closer to 100 to 1. Recent estimates put the current ratio at 500 to 1 -- the boss makes as much before lunch as the worker does all year. Greed is the cause of the high wages paid to the bosses even if the company is failing.

Greed is responsible for the endless stress and ruthless competition of the workplace and the strains and tensions of professional class marriages. Greed (in this instance another name for relentless ambition) explains much of the cheating on college campuses. Greed is responsible for outsourcing, which is incapable of comprehending that the employees who lose their jobs are also the consumers who sustain the economy. Greed generates the reckless ventures that in part caused the bubble of the late '90s. Greed causes expensive wars that shatter the budget. Greed is the reason that only the wealthy are benefitting so far from the economic upturn that is allegedly happening. Greed drives loan sharks. Greed is responsible for the success of big box stores that tax the poor with low wages to provide bargains for affluent suburban shoppers. Greed is the reason poor white Appalachians, poor African Americans and poor Native Americans must fight the wars that the wealthy start. Jessica Lynch joined the Army so she could go to college. Her Native American roommate, killed in action, joined so, single mother that she was, she could support her children. Greed is the reason why the country is being run by those whom the president has described, however inelegantly, as the ''haves and the have mores.''

No one said during the bizarre deification of President Reagan that he taught us that greed is good and that we should feel good about our greedy country. Greed is the reason that the country is being run by the insurance, pharmaceutical, weapons and petroleum industries. Greed causes worldwide sex slavery of women and children.

Greed drives the murders of the narcotics world. Greed is responsible for the exploitations of teen sports stars by colleges and for the mess in the pro sports world. It is also the cause of the use of performance drugs by young athletes. Greed is responsible for the bad advice lawyers gave the Church years ago to beat victims of sexual abuse into the ground. It is behind the scam artists who steal from the elderly.

Greed may have been a more serious problem for Americans, say, in the era of the robber barons. But the Garys and the Morgans and the Carnegies were a small bunch of men. Now their greed has seeped down to a much larger segment of the population.

The Catholic Church speaks of four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. Two are cheating workers out of wages and exploiting widows and children. Both happen every day in our greedy country.

Ambition is not evil within limits. The struggle for success is not bad within limits. Hard work and fair rewards are good within limits. It is not good to take from the poor and give to the rich, and that's exactly what this country is doing today.

Don't let anyone tell you that lust is the most deadly of the deadly sins.

Rung Three: Original NY Times Movie Review--

A. After reading the following review choose three of the characters: Regina, Ben, Oscar, Addie, Alexandra, Horace, or Leo to compare and contrast the film version vs. the play version in two-three paragraphs for each character. How much were the characters that you’ve chosen as you had imagined them when you read the play?

B. List five significant differences that you found between the play and the film.

' The Little Foxes,' Full of Evil, Reaches the Screen of the Music Hall -- New Film at Palace

By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: August 22, 1941

Lillian Hellman's grim and malignant melodrama, "The Little Foxes," which had the National Theatre's stage running knee-deep in gall and wormwood the season before last, has now been translated to the screen with all its original viciousness intact and with such extra-added virulence as the relentless camera of Director William Wyler and the tensile acting of Bette Davis could impart. As presented at the Music Hall yesterday, under the trade-mark of Samuel Goldwyn, "The Little Foxes" leaps to the front as the most bitingly sinister picture of the year and as one of the most cruelly realistic character studies yet shown on the screen.

No one who saw the play need be reminded that Miss Hellman was dipping acid straight when she penned this fearful fable of second-generation carpet-baggers in a small Southern town around 1900. Henrik Ibsen and William Faulkner could not together have designed a more morbid account of inter-family treachery and revoltingly ugly greed than was contained in Miss Hellman's purple drama of deadly intrigue in the Hubbard clan. And with a perfect knowledge of the camera's flexibility, the author and Mr. Wyler have derived out of the play a taut and cumulative screen story which exhales the creepy odor of decay and freezes charitable blood with the deliberation of a Frigidaire.

Frankly, there is nothing pretty nor inspiring about this almost fustian tale of Regina Giddens's foxiness in planting figurative knives in her own deceitful brothers' backs, of her callous neglect of her good husband when he is dying of a heart attack, all because she wants to grab the bulk of the family's rising fortune for herself. The whole suspense of the picture lies in the question of who's going to sink the last knife. Even the final elopement of Regina's appalled daughter, for whom the film conveniently provides a nice romance, adds little more than a touch of leavening irony. Regina is too hard a woman to mourn much for anything.

Thus the test of the picture is the effectiveness with which it exposes a family of evil people poisoning everything they touch. And this it does spectacularly. Mr. Wyler, with the aid of Gregg Toland, has used the camera to sweep in the myriad small details of a mauve decadent household and the more indicative facets of the many characters. The focus is sharp, the texture of the images hard and realistic. Individual scenes are extraordinarily vivid and compelling, such as that in which the Hubbard brothers plot a way to outdo their sister, or the almost unbearable scene in which Regina permits her husband to struggle un-assisted with death. Only when Mr. Wyler plays obvious tricks with mirrors does a bit of pretension creep in.

And Miss Davis's performance in the role which Talluluh Bankhead played so brassily on the stage is abundant with color and mood. True, she does occasionally drop an unmistakable imitation of her predecessor; she performs queer contortions with her arms like a dancer in a Hindu temple, and generally she comports herself as though she were balancing an Academy "Oscar" on her high-coiffed head. But the role calls for heavy theatrics; Miss Davis is all right.

Better than that, however, are the other members of the cast. Charles Dingle as Brother Ben Hubbard, the oldest and sharpest of the rattlesnake clan, is the perfect villain in respectable garb. Carl Benton Reid as Brother Oscar is magnificently dark, sullen and undependable. Patricia Collinge repeats her excellent stage performance as the faded flower of the Old South who tips the jug. Teresa Wright is fragile and pathetic as the harassed daughter of Regina. Dan Duryea is a shade too ungainly as Oscar's chicken-livered son, and Herbert Marshall is surprisingly British for a Southerner born and bred, but both fill difficult roles well.

"The Little Foxes" will not increase your admiration for mankind. It is cold and cynical. But it is a very exciting picture to watch in a comfortably objective way, especially if you enjoy expert stabbing-in-the-back.

Rung Four: Comparison to Real-Life Greed-- In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys-and the Percys against themselves. The following transcript, from the PBS documentary is the dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America's greatest natural disasters. After reading about this event, highlight five places within the text and parallel what you’ve highlighted with a direct quote from the play as I have done twice in red as an example.

Transcript

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/filmmore/pt.html

Billy Payne, Resident: Well, the winter of '27 it started raining early in the year that year. January, February, it rained it seemed like every day.

Sarah Percy, Resident: It rained and rained and rained and rained some more. It just looked like it would never stop.

Mildred Commodore, Resident: The river kept coming above flood level and it was rumored in all of the papers and things that if this levee would break we'd have a flood that would wash away from Memphis to New Orleans.

Narrator: On April 15, 1927-Good Friday-as another violent storm battered Greenville, Mississippi, a party held in one of the town's finest homes. As the rain intensified, guests were drawn to the windows. Just beyond their view the Mississippi River was rising to unprecedented heights. A burst of thunder shook the house and the party fell silent. All eyes turned to one man-LeRoy Percy. The former senator was one of the most powerful planters in the Mississippi Delta. "Senator Percy," one woman asked, "will the levees hold?" Percy gathered a group of men and rushed to the levee protecting Greenville from the river. The levee was holding, but barely.

Staring at the angry water, Percy could see that an epic battle was looming-pitting man against nature. What he couldn't see was that a human storm was also approaching-one that would pit money against honor, black man against white, even father against son.

Narrator: The people of the Delta fear God and the Mississippi, a saying goes. The river punishes with great destruction and rewards with great wealth. Floodwaters leave behind some of the most lush and fertile soil on earth. For half a century after the civil war, Delta planters had been richly rewarded by the river. By the early 1900's, they presided over one of the most productive cotton growing regions in the world. In an age when cotton was king, self-styled planter aristocrats ruled their domains like feudal lords.

The most ambitious of them all-was LeRoy Percy. His empire extended far beyond the cotton fields to the boardrooms of railroads and banks. As a prominent lawyer and businessman, he was determined to bring the plantation economy into the twentieth century.