ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST (1948)

Proving you can’t go home again . . . but might make second base, Lillian Hellman tried another helping of Southern Fried melodrama in this modestly successful prequel to her big hit play THE LITTLE FOXES.  Rapturously received in her B’way debut, Patricia Neal (already under lock-and-key at Warners?) lost her breakout role as the young, but already scheming Regina Hubbard (Tallulah Bankhead on stage/Bette Davis in the film) to Ann Blyth, less brittle than later, but still wholly inadequate as bitchy enchantress.  But for those who know LITTLE FOXES/’41, there’s fun to had parsing out who’s who (or rather who would become who), even Dan Duryea back in harness from the earlier film to play his own Uncle.  The story, with even more exposition than usual for Hellman, all about profiteering shop-owner Fredric March starting the family fortune by openly ‘cornering’ the salt market 15 years ago, during the Civil War, while hiding a secret still worse.*  Ambitious son Edmund O’Brien sniffs a chance at blackmail; doltish son Duryea needs a loan to marry a floozy; Blyth trying to stop a business start-up that leaves her out of the picture and losing handsome vet John Dall (who doesn’t particularly want her); and health-challenged wife Florence Eldridge (March’s real wife*) finally noticing how awful they all are.  This time, Hellman’s typically airless ‘well-made’ play not quite so well-made.  Sometimes a good thing when a crack or two lets in a bit of fresh air.  But here, under the stolid direction of Michael Gordon who gets wonderful lighting from cinematographer Hal Mohr, staged & shot as if in practice for live ‘50s tv anthology.  Odd for 1948; a cost-cutting strategy?  Not a patch on William Wyler’s FOXES, but tasty in its own backstabbing way.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Florence Eldridge rarely came across on film, but here you can see what her Mary Tyrone might have been in ‘56, playing against March in the original B’way production of Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Civil War salt speculation no exaggeration!  Here’s Mark Twain in LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI: ‘ . . . when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving (his warehouses) packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountains of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and so dizzy a height had the war sent up the price of the article.’

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, THE LITTLE FOXES.  Best watched first.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-little-foxes-1941.html