My streaming gem: why you should watch The Little Foxes

She is imperious and stylish, with a laugh like an open threat and an aversion to mansplaining. She is Bette Davis’s Regina Hubbard Giddens: the sharpest, funniest person in the room. Unfortunately she’s also a psychopath who presages the next 79 years of rapacious capitalism, but then you can’t have everything.

After the censorship clampdown of 1934, Hollywood didn’t make many radical films, but the odd one still snuck through: the progressive rom-com, Holiday; John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath; and The Little Foxes, a visually-astounding left-wing polemic that climaxes with the best horror sequence of its decade.

Related: My streaming gem: why you should watch My Happy Family

The film was adapted by socialist southerner Lillian Hellman from her hit play, and her politics run through it like the words through a stick of rock. Within seven years, she would be blacklisted as a subversive after telling the witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

The Little Foxes centres on the Hubbards, a nouveau riche family in the turn-of-the-century Deep South. They’ve made their money exploiting black people and marrying into the aristocracy. But they want more. And to get it, Regina must lure home her ailing husband, Horace (Herbert Marshall), and either charm or strong-arm him into helping them fund a cotton mill.

It’s at this point you may be thinking that you’re not in the mood for an old, 116-minute film about the funding of a mill, especially when there’s a pandemic on. I would counter these concerns by asking if you would like to see Bette Davis bully a man while wearing a dead bird on her head.

Regina is simply Davis’s most irresistible monster. It is a performance of startling physicality, full of inspired adornments: the way she acts down her nose at you, loftily readjusts that towering helmet of hair, or spreads out her arms to inhabit an entire sofa. But that is as much Regina’s performance as Davis’s, an exercise in self-possession, the trappings of a woman who refuses to be patronised.

It’s just a shame she’s evil. At first, Regina has our sympathy, as Hellman invests her with several of the writer’s own virtues: she is canny, witty and will not be underestimated. “You understand what Ben means?” asks her brother Oscar, after a laborious explanation of their recent manoeuvrings. “Yes, Oscar,” she replies. “I understood when it was happening.” But she has long been consumed by avarice, and that droll, dismissive delivery will become drenched in menace, sharpening to a chilling whisper as the movie reaches its climax.

That climax, in which Davis enters wearing her bird hat, and proceeds to systematically emasculate a sweating Marshall, is one of the most extraordinary sequences of its era, with one of the most shocking denouements. It is also a showcase for the singular brilliance of cinematographer Gregg Toland, fresh from some film called Citizen Kane. Toland simply seemed to see more possibilities in every shot than anyone else, and in that scene he juxtaposes unforgiving close-ups and mesmerising background action, ratcheting up the unease before freezing the blood.

Such pyrotechnics have a point. The Little Foxes is a warning: of capitalism run rampant; of falsity and phony tradition; of fascism. Regina’s supercilious brother, Ben (Charles Dingle) soaks the poor, endorses a burglary, and bribes the governor for water rights, before telling his sister: “The world’s open for people like you and me … We’ll own this country someday.” But he isn’t just talking about financiers, and Hellman wasn’t only indicting wealth.

Appeasement was the defining issue of the period, and the writer has it in her crosshairs. While the film is imperfect in its treatment of race, it gives its defining comment on Nazism to a black woman, Jessie Coles Grayson. “There’s people that eats up the whole world and all the people on it,” she says. “Then there’s people that stand around and watch them do it.”

Viewed 79 years on, and through the prism of an American election campaign, so much of The Little Foxes seems prescient, though particularly Ben’s pompous philosophising, which is couched in quasi-Christian terms, and embraces the beliefs underpinning both fake news (“The Lord forgives those who invent what they need”) and fascism. “I can’t believe the Lord means for the strong to parade their strength,” he says, “but I don’t mind doing it if it’s got to be done.”

Nor does Regina. And it’s the blanched Davis who is this film’s unforgettable, ice-cold centre: poisoned by greed, and leaving empathy, humanity and gentleness all gasping for breath.

• The Little Foxes is available on Amazon Prime in the US and UK