La vipère (1941)

Herbert Marshall: Horace Giddens

Photos 

Quotes 

• Horace Giddens : Maybe it's easy for the dying to be honest. I'm sick of you, sick of this house, sick of my unhappy life with you. I'm sick of your brothers and their dirty tricks to make a dime. There must be better ways of getting rich than building sweatshops and pounding the bones of the town to make dividends for you to spend. You'll wreck the town, you and your brothers. You'll wreck the country, you and your kind, if they let you. But not me, I'll die my own way, and I'll do it without making the world worse. I leave that to you.

• Addie : Yes, they got mighty well-off cheating the poor. Well, there's people that eats up the whole Earth and all the people on it. Like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there's people that stand around and watch them do it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.

  Horace Giddens : There's something else in the Bible, Addie. Take us the foxes... the little foxes that spoil the vines... for our vines have tender grapes.

• Regina Giddens : [about marrying Horace]  It didn't take me long to find out my mistake. Then it was just as if I couldn't stand the sight of you. I couldn't bear to have you touch me. I thought you were such a soft weak fool, you were so understanding when I didn't want you near me. The lies and excuses I used to make to you, and you believed them. That was when I began to despise you.

  Horace Giddens : [starts looking agitated]  Why didn't you leave me?

  Regina Giddens : Where was I to go? What money did I have? I didn't think about it much, if I had, I'd have known you'd die before I did. But I couldn't have guessed you'd get heart trouble so early and so bad. I'm lucky Horace. I've always been lucky. I'll be lucky again.

  [Horace drops his emergency medicine] 

  Horace Giddens : The other bottle. Please, upstairs in my room, in the drawer.

  [Regina does nothing. Horace stumbles upstairs himself and collapses] 

• Regina Giddens : [having learned what her brothers and cousin Leo have been up to, laughing]  Well, this'll make a fine little scandal.

  Horace Giddens : Couldn't it?

  Regina Giddens : A fine little scandal to hold over their heads. Ha ha! How could they be such fools?

• Horace Giddens : I want to know why Zan came to fetch me.

  Addie : I don't know, Mr. Horace. All I know is, big things is goin' on. Everybody gonna be high-toned rich. You too. All 'cause smoke gonna start from a building that ain't even up yet.