Zora Neale Hurston told her story and they kicked her out of New York City

[sovay]

I saw William Wyler's The Little Foxes (1941) tonight at the Somerville Theatre. It was screening especially for the eve of the election, which sounds counterintuitive if you hear the story vaguely described as a turn-of-the-century Southern Gothic—adapted by Lillian Hellman from her Broadway play—but not if you listen to the words of the daughter finally making the decision to leave her rapacious, self-devouring family and their casually exploitative way of life:

You couldn't [make me stay], Mama. Because I don't want to stay with you. Because I'm beginning to understand about things. Addie said there were people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it. And just now Uncle Ben said the same thing, really the same thing. Well, tell him from me, Mama, I'm not going to watch you do it. Tell him I'll be fighting as hard as he is—someplace where people don't just stand around and watch.

In isolationist 1941, I can see a lot of reasons a left-wing Jewish screenwriter and a Jewish director who had been trying since 1936 to get his relatives out of Germany might have wanted to make a movie suggesting that America should not just stand around and watch. In 2016, on the last night of a presidential campaign which has included some of the most public and unvarnished racist, misogynist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, the list goes on like laundry and it rarely even bothered with dogwhistles (international banks! global financial powers! If Trump had ever used the phrase "rootless cosmopolitans," I think we'd have had an anti-Semitic bingo) rhetoric I have heard from a mainstream political candidate in my lifetime, it's still pretty relevant. I'm not sure that refusing to stand around and watch ever goes out of style.

So, you know. Vote.

Comments

[spatch]

It's amazing how long the film took to get to the message. Parts of it were foreshadowed, yes, but it didn't entirely gel until the daughter went into her speech. I was significantly impressed since her speech did away entirely with histrionics; no Tennessee Williams shouty declamations here. Hers was quiet yet confrontational. Good stuff. Very glad we saw it.

[sovay]

Parts of it were foreshadowed, yes, but it didn't entirely gel until the daughter went into her speech.

I could not see it as accidental that a black character—Addie—is the first to warn against "the people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it." Zan and David had better send for her when they get settled. Nobody should be left to live alone with Regina and her brothers.

I was significantly impressed since her speech did away entirely with histrionics; no Tennessee Williams shouty declamations here.

Yes. It's a very simple speech. It doesn't need to be more.

Good stuff. Very glad we saw it.

I liked, too, that it wasn't simplistically written: the audience has conflicting loyalties and I think we're directed to. We want to see Regina get the better of her sleazy, condescending brothers, but not over the bodies of her husband and her daughter. She's fighting with unequal weapons, but for what—a controlling interest in a sweatshop cotton mill? Birdie, last daughter of a plantation owner who died in the Civil War, is the personification of the false romanticized antebellum South ("We were good to our people. Everybody knew that. We were better to them than . . .") that shows up badly against the present-day obvious racial inequities of the town, but that doesn't mean she deserves to have ended up a weeping alcoholic in an abusive marriage with a husband who boasts to strangers of his business acumen in marrying her for her family's cotton. There are multiple axes of power in this play. I am only a little sorry that the film couldn't simply let Alexandra, without romance, walk out.