Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings by Kracauer Siegfried Rawson Kristy Jay Martin von Moltke Johannes

Author:Kracauer, Siegfried, Rawson, Kristy, Jay, Martin, von Moltke, Johannes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-520-27183-8
Publisher: University of California Press

20 William Wyler’s New Bette Davis Film

(1941)

The Samuel Goldwyn production company has now released the new Bette Davis film Little Foxes [USA 1941], directed by William Wyler. Both for its qualities and for its flaws, the film represents an important work that met with great success in New York. Based on a stage play, the film takes place in the South and largely amounts to a character study of the mean, avaricious Regina Giddens, who sets out to win over her husband, a mortally ill banker, for the vague financial projects of her unscrupulous brothers, with whom she makes common cause; when, having seen through the conspiracy, her husband declines her wish, she attacks him verbally until he has a heart attack, and then refuses to fetch the requisite medicine from upstairs. He attempts to climb the stairs himself and falls; his death is a cold-blooded murder.

Wyler had already shown in films such as These Three [USA 1936] and Dead End [USA 1937] that he is not afraid to break with habits and conventions when he is out to pry open psychological chasms or to render problematic characters; here again, he continues along his path with a determination that deserves particular praise in view of the dominant tendency toward the standardization of film subjects.

The basic weakness of the film lies in the fact that, here as in earlier works, Wyler always makes brilliant use of film technique but fails to create from the possibilities inherent in film alone. These are all the more difficult to access since Wyler adopts a subject that was conceptualized exclusively for the theater and suggests theatrical staging; but why does he obey the directives of this material so heedlessly? Apparently because he lacks the ultimate relation to the medium of film, out of which Griffith, Stroheim, or René Clair once chose and shaped their themes. Unlike these men, who knew well that a film is only cinema when objects, too, actively participate in the action, Wyler fails to penetrate deeply into the adapted stage play to transform it for the purposes of film. Which is also to say that the film is courageous only in its subject matter; its treatment hews to conventional lines and sabotages the effect of the thematic conceit.—Once we have recognized Wyler’s weakness, we are all the more free to admire the high degree of cultivation with which he makes human events palpable. Supported by Gregg Toland’s excellent photography, he renders visible every psychological nuance. The way he describes the unease of a guest from Chicago and of several family members during a piano recital in the salon is inimitable, as is the realization of the catastrophe just before the end: Regina sits in the background, brightly lit and motionless, while her husband moves toward the stairs from the front. Then we are presented with a close-up of her face, traversed by the shadow of the staggering man, and a few moments later we see the husband crawling up the stairs behind her like a wounded animal.

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