Sightlines · reception
How The Little Foxes was received
1941 · William Wyler · The Little Foxes on Sightlines
The arc
A prestige hit in 1941 — nine Oscar nominations — yet it went home with zero, and it's spent decades slightly overshadowed by Citizen Kane, the other Gregg Toland deep-focus landmark from the very same year. Cinephiles have long since reclaimed it as one of Wyler's very best.
What’s debated
The eternal fan debate: is Bette Davis's icy, white-powdered Regina a stroke of genius or too mannered — and was Tallulah Bankhead, who owned the role on Broadway and was famously bitter about losing the film, actually better?
Its footprint
It's a permanent exhibit in the deep-focus museum — André Bazin held Toland and Wyler's staging here up as a model of what mise-en-scène could do, and the film is still taught alongside Kane. It also gave film culture one of Davis's definitive screen villainesses.
Where it stands
A canon staple twice over — essential Bette Davis and essential Wyler — the kind of 'you must have seen this' title Letterboxd users discover through the Davis filmography and stay for the staircase.
Did you know? The set was a battlefield: Davis and Wyler — who'd made Jezebel and The Letter together — fought so bitterly over how to play Regina that Davis walked off the production for a time, and the two never made another film together.