Movies |
The Letter
directed by William Wyler
By
Published: Nov 19, 2023
Category:
Drama
I have praised Dodsworth — if you haven’t watched it, put it high on your list — in terms so effusive you could think I want to have children with it. “The Letter” is just as good. Maybe better.
“If your wife had only shot Hammond once, the whole thing would be absolutely plain sailing. Unfortunately, she fired six times.”
– the lawyer
Somerset Maugham, the most popular writer in the world for much of his life, traveled widely, collecting stories as well as experiences. In the early 1920s, in British Malaya, he heard one he knew he could use.
In 1911, the manager of a tin mine in Kuala Lumpur visited Ethel Proudlock, the wife of a school headmaster, when her husband wasn’t home. He turned out the light and attempted to kiss her. Reaching for the light switch, she somehow picked up a revolver and shot him — not once but six times. At the trial, the prosecutor revealed a motive: the mine owner had been her lover but had moved on to a Chinese woman. White colonials sympathized with the killer — she was, it was said, defending her honor. Public opinion didn’t prevail. She was convicted, then pardoned. Her marriage ended. She moved to America.
Maugham made one change in the story: He had the woman write a letter begging the man to come and see her on the evening her husband was away. Bad luck for her: her lover’s Chinese mistress now had the letter. She was willing to part with this incriminating document — but that would require such a significant payment that the woman’s husband would have to raise it.
Maugham published “The Letter” as a short story and adapted it for the theater. It was filmed in 1929, and then, in 1940, William Wyler made the film that took Maugham’s story into the Great Films of All Time. Watch the trailer.
Wyler knew what he wanted to do. He made decisions. And defended them. Start with the opening scene: Leslie Crosbie shooting Geoff Hammond. On the page, it’s a paragraph. On screen, it’s two minutes. Filming it took Wyler the entire day — surely a warning to the studio, which was expecting him to knock off three or four pages a day.
Wyler doesn’t linger. Leslie’s husband Robert is working at one of his plantations. Leslie tells her servant to fetch him. He returns immediately. He’s already called his lawyer and a police inspector — signals that he will believe his wife’s explanation of the shooting.
The easy way — the lazy way – to tell the story is to follow the relationship of the husband and wife as the evidence mounts against her. Wyler doesn’t avoid that, but his greater interest is the duel between the wife and the Chinese woman. When you get to the final scene, which echoes the atmosphere and tone of the opening scene, you’ll have the deepest possible understanding of this drama. [To rent the stream of the movie from Amazon, click here.]
The acting — it is to swoon. Bette Davis gives a performance that made her Oscar nomination inevitable. She’s stiff and proper and so very English, but she’s also haunted by what she’s done, and the haunting gradually takes over. Herbert Marshall is her credulous husband, who really doesn’t know his wife and doesn’t want to meet her now. The studio didn’t want James Stephenson as her lawyer, but Wyler insisted — and although the film got seven nominations, only Stephenson won an Academy Award, for Supporting Actor. And another Oscar could have gone to the dark environment of the film — the rubber plants practically ooze evil.
The Times review: “as taut and insinuating a melodrama as has come along this year — a film which extenuates tension like a grim inquisitor’s rack.” In 1940, that was a rave. It still is.
