OVP: The Letter (1940)

Film: The Letter (1940)

Stars: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort, Gale Sondergaard

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actress-Bette Davis, Supporting Actor-James Stephenson, Cinematography, Film Editing, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

As I work my way through all of the Oscar nominees from every year, while the films are oftentimes randomly-selected, I do end up gravitating toward movies that I suspect I'll actually like more often-than-not, and as a result some of my favorite performers I've nearly completed all of their nominated work.  Bette Davis would win 10 Oscar nominations in her career, one of the largest counts of any performer ever, and I am nearly done with the list after recently catching her in The Letter.  Bette is one of my favorite actresses-she's versatile in a way that modern performers are, fully-committing to the role (had she rose to fame in the 1950's, she would have certainly been part of the "Method School" of acting), and eschewing her glamour if need be to sink a part.  That's evident in The Letter, the remake of the 1929 film that won Jeanne Eagels a nomination for the same part that won Davis hers, where she totally inhabits the cutthroat Leslie Crosbie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Leslie Crosbie is a married woman in Malaya, who in the opening scene of the film has shot Geoff Hammand, a man we otherwise assume to be "decent" but who Leslie confesses tried to rape her (or in 1940's parlance, "make love to me") and she killed him in self-defense.  While Leslie will stand trial, everyone assumes that she's innocent, and the only person who seems to suspect her story is her attorney Howard Joyce (Stephenson), whose clerk shows him a letter that Leslie wrote to Hammond, asking him to come to see her (implying that they were having an affair).  As the film goes, it turns out that, despite Leslie's shifting story, she was having an affair with Hammond even though they are both married (he's wed to a Eurasian woman played by Sondergaard), and she killed him in a jealous rage.  In the end, Howard buys back the letter, putting his legal career in jeopardy, but it works temporarily-Leslie is acquitted due to lack of evidence.  However, as the film ends, Leslie tells her husband Robert (Marshall) that she still loves Hammond & doesn't love him, and when she enters their garden, she realizes that Mrs. Hammond is there, ready to kill her, which she does...and then is promptly arrested for the crime of enacting revenge on the woman who killed her husband.

I'd already seen the Eagels version of The Letter (you can read about it here), and liked it-Eagels is magnificent, and it's a good part.  The 1940 film is even better, but it struggles because in 1929 you could have a pre-Code ending, and you can't in 1940.  In the Eagels version, the ending is different-the Leslie character lives & gets away with the murder, but her husband keeps her in Malaysia as punishment for her sins rather than letting her return home.  She's left, therefore, in a prison of her own marriage.  It's much more effective than simply having Leslie, who has spent the entire movie crawling over barbed wire to ensure that she doesn't pay for her sins, randomly walk into her own death.  I don't know a better way to have gotten around the Hays Code without changing the court result (which would have totally ruined the plot, since the corrupted justice system is so central to the plot of the film), but the ending nearly ruins the movie, which otherwise is a triumph.

Much of that triumph comes from the two key parts in the film played by Davis & Stephenson.  Davis was born to play the role of a woman like this-she was so good at making complicated women genuinely complicated, rather than having them wither under the male gaze.  She plays her as someone who knows her privilege, who knows her status as a woman-of-good-background, and knows how to wield that power to maximum effect.  The makeup department helps (the heavy smoky eye look just accentuates that "she's got Bette Davis eyes"), but Davis brings a fire to this role, a woman who wants to roll the dice as long as she can to see if she's caught.  Stephenson is equally good as the lawyer drawn into her lair.  Oftentimes with this part he'd be played for a sap, but he goes in willingly, though perhaps not with the same level of knowledge of how bad Leslie is for him until it's too late.  Both were richly deserved Oscar nominations.  The only real weak link in the cast is Sondergaard, who has virtually no words and is heavily into yellowface dramatics that, are, well, pretty racist (you'd be fine fast-forwarding through most of her scenes).

The remaining nominations are all good, though not all equal.  The score is fine-it's a heavy, dramatic score, but it doesn't standout in the way you'd expect a film like this to (this is not Now, Voyager).  The direction is taut & layered, as is the cinematography (so focused on Davis unmoved face, it captures the spirit of her character without her even needing to say a word).  The editing is also strong, though again the Sondergaard sequences needed to be trimmed or played for less dramatics (even in 1940, when the treatment of Sondergaard's character might have been commonplace, it should have been obvious that this was hitting a melodrama that the rest of the film didn't meld with).  I will say, again, that had this been a year where Makeup was a category at the Oscars (that didn't become a competitive field until the early 1980's), I would have cited it, as Davis has never looked better & I think this is one of those moments where the increasingly dramatic makeup (showing her guilt with a heavy mascara pen) is crucial to the character herself.