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| Warner Bros. | Release Date: November 23, 1940 |
Starring:
Bette Davis, Bruce Lester, Cecil Kellaway, Doris Lloyd, Elizabeth Inglis, Frieda Inescort, Gale Sondergaard, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Victor Sen Yung
Summary:
The wife of a rubber plantation administrator shoots a man to death and claims it was self-defense, but a letter in her own hand may prove her undoing.
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Bette Davis gave one of her best and nastiest performances in Wyler's stylishly sordid 1940 romantic murder-mystery from W. Somerset Maugham's story. [02 May 2008, p.C5]
In William Wyler’s richly torrid melodrama The Letter, Davis unsurprisingly mesmerizes as a duplicitous murderess pleading self-defense. What is surprising is how, with the help of a good, sympathetic director, she doesn’t play the role in all-out pit viper mode. Instead, Davis reveals something vulnerable and pitiable.
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Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the passion of a woman who'd kill a man for trying to leave her. She is helped by an excellent script (by Howard Koch) and by two unusually charged performances--James Stephenson as her lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband.
Like Frankenstein’s monster in the Universal horror classics, The Letter keeps its prize creature too long in the shadows. But a Davis movie cannot withstand scrutiny without her, and even a bad Davis movie where she’s hamming and mugging and even humiliating herself is more fun than practically no Bette at all.
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