Before the foxes were even little

I did a post on the movie The Little Foxes some time back. Some years late, Lillian Hellman wrote a play that was a prequel to The Little Foxes, called Another Part of the Forest. It's unsurprising that the play would get turned into a movie, and it's one I'd been curious to see for some time. Several months back, TCM finally ran it, and I recently got around to watching it to do a post on here.

The Little Foxes tells the story of the Hubbard family in a small town in Alabama circa 1900. As Another Part of the Forest opens, it's Confederate Memorial Day in the year 1880, so 15 years after the war ended. Col. Isham leads the entire town -- well, almost the entire town -- in remembering their defeat, specifically a massacre of local boys that Isham just knows someone local had to clue the Union Army into, at the local war memorial, and watching from the nearby woods is Lavinia Hubbard (Florence Eldridge), the matriarch of the Hubbard family. I metioned that almost the entire town is there. Conspicuously not there are most of the Hubbards. Oscar (Dan Duryea, who in the earlier movie played Oscar's son) shows up, but Isham tells him he's decidedly not wanted. This especially because he cavorts with a dance-hall girl.

Oscar's brother Ben (Edmond O'Brien) comes to town having been in the big city, where he was hoping to invest some money. But he was called back home by his father, Marcus (Fredric March), who runs the local dry goods store with an iron fist. Dad was ruthless in making his fortune, and he thinks that all of his kids are varying sorts of weak, and doesn't necessarily care for any of them. As for Lavinia, she seems to think the family has some sin to atone for, as she shows up at the Confederate memorial statue talking about taking some of the family fortune and using it to start a local hospital.

Rounding out the family is daughter Regina (Ann Blyth). She's been carrying on with a rather older man, John Bagtry (John Dall), who was injured in the war and who still hasn't gotten over it. Regina is hoping he'll marry her and take her away to Chicago to get the heck away from the rest of her family. Ben thinks she should marry one of the richer guys in town, but Regina is having nothing to do with that. Indeed, she's perfectly willing to use her brothers' secrets to try to get Dad to do her billing. It's clear that nobody in the family loves one another, with the exception of Lavinia. But then Lavinia is the sort of woman who, in that era, might have been a candidate for a sanitarium, if only for the rest of the family to keep her silent.

Lavinia reveals what she knows of the family secrets, which is that Marcus made the family fortune by smuggling salt during the war and then selling it at inflated prices. That too explains why the rest of the county seems to hate the Hubbards. But there's a lot more in the way of secrets, and as the family bicker with one another, those secrets are about to come out.

I mentioned at the beginning that Another Part of the Forest was based on a stage play, and once again those origins seem fairly clear. Another Part of the Forest, however, is helped by a bunch of fine performances, as well as a script that while not great, is so overripe that it makes the movie fun. The movie winds up being good, although probably not for the reasons Lillian Hellman would have wanted.