1940: The Letter

The Letter (Wyler, 1940) 7/10

" Strange that a man can live with a woman for ten years and not know the first thing about her " (Howard Joyce)

Baking under the hot Malayan moonlight, a group of rubber plantation workers sway in their hammocks. Only the faint dripping of latex from a tapped rubber tree breaks the tropical silence. After snaking past the workers' makeshift huts, Tony Gaudio's camera suddenly stops at the gates of the plantation's estate. The sticky stillness of the night becomes broken in an instant.

Shots are fired and a man stumbles down a set of steps. Following him through the door is Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), who throttles him with six bullets into his spine. And thus one of cinema's greatest opening sequences marks the entrance to William Wyler's 1940 film The Letter: a dark and malevolent melodrama featuring one of Bette Davis' most sinister performances.

Based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham The Letter is an exquisite tale of betrayal, deception and corruption. After gunning down Geoffrey Hammond, a mutal friend of her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall), outside her doorsteps, Leslie Crosbie tells her husband that a drunken Geoffrey attempted to rape her whilst she engaged in lace-making. Believing the crediblity of his quaint middle-class wife, Robert hires friend Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), a notable barrister amongst Southeast Asia's British population.

Believing it to be an open-shut case, Howard is not perturbed about Leslie's robotic version of the events until a letter appears that contradicts Leslie's testimony. In The Letter, director William Wyler opts to reveal the incriminating letter's contents within the first twenty-five minutes in order to deeply investigate elements of seduction, manipulation and duplicity. Thus what could have been an anti-climatic thriller based on the letter's adulterous contents, instead becomes a sultry, slow-moving journey into the darkest nooks of the human soul.

With her dour glasses and her penchant for crocheting, Leslie is an unlikely perpetrator of murder. Despite her loneliness and isolation, she repeatedly stresses a fidelity to her husband through the fabrication of a cover for their bed. By propagating this self-image throughout The Letter, Davis' character appears to enamour the film's two central male characters through her performance. In relaying her version of the events, Leslie becomes a performer: creating the image of a selfless, dutiful asexual wife. Characters consistently applaud and congratulate her for the delivery and memorized facilitation of the story. There is even an aura of theatricality about her methods including fainting, histronic swoons into her husband's arms and moments of uncustomary sharpness replaced by melodramatic tears.

Yet, this aura of calm, British strength vanishes in the film's brilliant meeting between Leslie and Hammond's Eurasian widow (Gale Sondergaard). Using a windchime as the only sound effect, Wyler creates a masterful atmosphere of smoky tension. And while on the surface the meeting serves to consolidate Howard Joyce's ethical atrophy through the corrupt acquisition of the letter, underneath this meeting between the two rivals serves as a composition of the film's sub-textual engagements.

Meeting Hammond's widow in the back of a shop in the Chinese Quarter, Leslie nurtures Howard's achilles heel. Through her expressive eyes, Leslie has seduced Howard through unspoken terms. The pair's body language and Howard's consigned sweaty grin of internal turmoil denotes this. But when the pair meet Hammond's widow, the tough interior and seductive motives of Leslie disappear. Genuine fear is smeared across her face. Wyler clevely notes the shift in power that has taken place in the room.

Wishing for their cash crops to grow in "civilized climates," Leslie and her fellow racist expatriates espouse the pre-eminence of British values in their imposed cultural hierarchy. But through this deal in a claustrophobic room in the Chinese Quarter, all of their clean cultural vigor is replaced by the notion of impotent imperial corruption and a perversion of civility. Hammond's widow and her fellow Southeast Asians have now acquired the upper hand. Through an interpreter, she controls Leslie's actions through the removal of her shawl and the proximity of their bodies: she even is filmed standing higher than Davis' character with the latter looking up at her with slavish consternation.

Yet, amongst the European classes, the tropical weather and palm-lined topography is viewed throughout the film as a possible cause of this moral diversion from authenticated imperial values. Robert Crosbie in particular believes that the region is responsible for his wife's flirtation with immoral ideas and figures. In moving her to another region with a greater European population, he believes balance and strong character traits will be restored. Yet, this inbred sense of cultural superiority masks the poison within the film's European parties. Via their isolation from Britain, these colonists have allowed their true personalities to spring forth. Subsequently, this has allowed the film's British characters to implement a system of justice constructed on their own corrupt visions of equality, honour and fairness.

The film's cyclical opening and conclusion both feature a full moon: a visual symbol of Leslie's internal savagery; allowing her to awaken the beast within her and bring it to the forefront. Behind her quiet, middle-class exterior, there lies a cold individual whose fondness toward knives and guns belies her gendered claims that her sex prevents her from knowing much about them. These fascinating contradictions, thus pull and repel characters toward her.

The unspoken sexual and cultural tension simmering throughout The Letter allows for the film's central characters to commit unethical acts. Leslie engages in an affair that is not simply a fling, but a hidden lifestyle as carefully calculated and constructed as her personal narrative of Hammond's death. Her reasons for murdering him demonstrate her superiority complex as she is aghast that he would love his Eurasian wife more than his British mistress. She even repeatedly compares Hammond's wife to a ghoulish creature wearing a "mask" rather than a face and fails to trust her indigenous house servants. Yet, these racist reactions go amiss in the jingoistic Crosbie household, in which the film's true monster resides in luxury and comfort.

Given his close friendships with the local population, Howard Joyce is possibly the only character who feels guilt over these epithets. Deceived by her shy words, Howard is secretly smitten with Leslie. Upon the arrival of the letter, this opinion develops into something more complex. Ethically, Howard contests the internal duel between his conscience and his heart. On the one hand, he realizes the letter proves Leslie's guilt, yet his friendship with her and possible amourous desire for her pushes him into a world of corruption. By purchasing the letter, Howard implicitly endorses a judicial system in which the wealthy can buy verdicts and the marginalized must service justice through alternative methods.

The second of Wyler's three collaborations with Bette Davis, The Letter is a smouldering, Noirish tale peppered with two fantastic performances by Davis and Stephenson. Usually equated with intense melodrama, Davis is particularly dazzling in an underplayed role designed to strengthen the film's notion of her as a woman without a conscience; as is John Stephenson in a role that garned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Sadly, Stephenson would die of a heart attack, a year after creating his meticulous performance as a ethically-frayed lawyer.

Yet, the real star of the film is cinematographer Tony Gaudio. With his fluid deep-focus cinematography and emphasis on dark backlighting, Gaudio creates an atmospheric tropical world in which the social boredom and sexual bite that surrounds the film's characters is clearly evident from the film's brilliant tracking-shot opening and chilling conclusion. Evidently, Wyler's pacing and Max Steiner's score are far too thick in their slow, melodramatic ingredients. But regardless of these flaws, The Letter is still one of the best melodramas of the Forties and a dark sinister gem of black and white cinematography.

* The Letter is available in Warner Brothers Bette Davis Collection Vol. 1

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque