William Wyler’s adaptation of Maugham opens with one of the great first shots and keeps its nerve for most of 95 minutes. Bette Davis lies beautifully, James Stephenson carries the middle, and only the last few minutes let the studio in.
William Wyler opens The Letter with a shot we have never quite shaken. The camera drifts along a rubber plantation at night: sap dripping into a cup, workers asleep in hammocks, a cockatoo on a rail. A shot rings out, a man staggers onto a veranda, and Bette Davis follows him out and keeps firing until the gun is empty. The moon comes out from behind a cloud as if to see what she has done. Nobody has said a word. That is the murder, and the film is about the ninety minutes of talking that follow it. It is very good, and it is good in the way that Wyler’s best work is good: quiet, exact, and unimpressed by its own star.
The story is Somerset Maugham’s, from his play, and Howard Koch’s screenplay keeps its shape. Leslie Crosbie says a neighbour tried to rape her and she shot him in self-defence. Her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall), a decent, tired man who has been on the estate too long, believes her without needing to think about it. Their lawyer Howard Joyce (James Stephenson) believes her too, until a letter surfaces that she should not have written, and the dead man’s widow (Gale Sondergaard) turns out to own it. From there the film is a negotiation, and Wyler shoots negotiations better than most directors shoot gunfights.
Tony Gaudio does the moonlight. It comes through slatted blinds and lies across Davis in bars, and whenever she is about to lie the light seems to find her face and hold it there. The plantation house is all shutters and shadow; the Chinese quarter, where Joyce goes to buy the letter back, is a beaded curtain, a smoky curio shop and Sondergaard waiting behind it. We found that scene properly unsettling, and it is almost silent: Mrs. Hammond makes Leslie stoop to pick the letter off the floor, and Gaudio lights only the widow’s eyes. Max Steiner’s score is at its best here, held down to a few notes. Elsewhere it swells every time Davis crosses a room, and the film would be stronger with half of it.
Davis is doing something difficult. Leslie is a woman who has rehearsed her story and knows it is being believed, and Davis plays the pleasure of that as well as the fear. Between scenes of testimony she sits and makes lace, and the lace becomes a way of not looking at anyone. Stephenson, though, is the surprise. Joyce is a lawyer who discovers his client is guilty and decides to help her anyway, and Stephenson plays the decision as a slow physical collapse: shoulders first, then voice. When he tells his wife Dorothy (Frieda Inescort) that everything is fine, we did not believe him either.
Marshall is asked to be dull and loyal and manages both without ever being boring. Victor Sen Yung, as the clerk Ong Chi Seng, is the film’s sharpest instrument, smiling through every sentence and never once saying what he means. Sondergaard, an American actress in heavy make-up as a Eurasian widow, has two scenes and almost no lines; it is period casting, and we note it plainly, and she is still the most frightening person on screen. Orry-Kelly dresses Leslie in white throughout, which is either a joke or a judgement.
The complaints are two. The middle stretch is talky, with Davis off screen for long runs while men in linen suits discuss her in offices; some critics have found this a failure of nerve, and it is fair to say the film is more interested in Joyce than in his client for a while. And the final minutes are arranged to satisfy the censors of 1940 rather than the story, which we will not describe except to say that Maugham did not end it that way and Wyler plainly knew it. Warren Low and George Amy cut the rest with patience; the ending they cut fast, as if to be done with it.
Wyler had directed Davis in Jezebel (1938) and would do so again in The Little Foxes (1941), and this is the tightest of the three. It runs 95 minutes and carries a PG, though there is a shooting before the title and a great deal of adult behaviour after it. Watch it late, with the lights off, and forgive it the last five minutes. The first one is worth it.
