There's a little game I love to play with myself when I watch a movie a second time after a very long period: trying to spot the residual bits, whatever can emerge from memory when the rest drowned into oblivion. And so I could remember three key moments from William Wyler's "The Letter".
First, the opening killing in some tropical colony, gunshots heard off screen, a man stumbling to his death and Bette Davis standing behind a gun pointed at him. Then there was that nightmarishly stone-faced Asian woman, played by Gale Sondergaard. And finally, maybe the moment I was looking forward the most to, when a suave Occidentalized Asian man disappears between two luxurious cars; the sound of a closing door makes us expect to see him driving one of them, but it's actually a jalopy half their size that emerges between, leaving a thick dust of smoke.
That gag worthy of a Warner cartoon and yet coming from Wyler, speaks as eloquently as the other images I just described: yhey're all about the Asian setting, the plantation the plantation where indigenous manservants witness the death of a White men killed by a rich White women, the man's widow wearing traditional clothes as to assert her rejection of the Occident and whose hurt pride is engraved in her face like a death threat on a tombstone, and finally the clerk who speaks perfect English, does his best to accommodate and yet whose car is hilariously dwarfed by the others.
There's such a good mixture of patronizing respect and colonial contempt that forges the intercultural relationships within the film that if anything, the ending, while tying the plot together, should have tied both these cultural issues as well. The problem is that the film was made in 1940, one year shy away from a double revolution: "Citizen Kane" and "The Maltese Falcon". What have these movies got in common? They had flawed protagonists who get a moral comeuppance that still, didn't moralize the audience. These narrative patterns made possible by the noir-genre and the rise of antiheroic figures could challenge the Hays Code.
Unfortunately, movies like "The Letter", for all the competence of director William Wyler, actors Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson, composer Max Steiner and a hypnotic black-and-white cinematography, couldn't get away with the ending that made the original play written by Sommerset Maughan a critical success. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the ending "weak", blaming it on the Code and I couldn't have said it better, the film had all the makings of a pre-noir masterpiece but it failed at the last minute, after ninety made of sheer greatness.
It opens with what seems to be a "what have I done moment?" when we see Leslie Crosby (Davis) standing with a shock and bewildered face behind her victim. Then husband Robert (Marshall) comes with his lawyer and friend Howard (Stephenson). Leslie explains that the man tried to abuse her and she defended herself. Still, there's something very matter-of-factly in her narration, she doesn't even try. She's twice confident about her husband's blind and having law on her side to get off the hook in both matters. The lady is a paradox, unconscious and calculating, good enough an actress to memorize a perfect alibi but not so good that it doesn't raise Stephenson's suspicion.
The lawyer smells something fishy in that self-defense story and Crosby's casualness didn't help not to mention the way she emptied her gun as if she was more trying to silence him than avenging her offended honor. Wyler isn't oblivious to our doubts and without further waiting, the next scene, a charming and scene-stealing clerk tells Howard about the existence of a a letter that might incriminate Leslie, proving that Hammond's visit wasn't unexpected. The letter is in Hammond's Eurasian wife's hands and she won't sell it cheaply. The plot isn't a masterstroke of complexity but Wyler can unveil characters' most complex emotional struggles just by the use of a camera.
Wyler's use of silences, of lights and shadows can say al lot more than Howard Koch's screenplay, in Bette Davis' eyes, we can sense the moments where her confidence is cornered by a too inquisitive question, in Stephenson's pauses and hesitations we witness the moral dilemma of a man compromising his own ethics to protect a murderess. Even in the crucial letter's exchange, Wyler heightens the tension with long close up on knives, chimes, on the Asian woman's threatening glare that might say she's not taking the bargain as an end, the action lingers on small and seemingly meaningless details but it does so with a powerful intensity. So from a simple and straightforward plot, Wyler provides deep understandings of the gap between the Occidental and the Oriental world.
We have silence being bought like a commercial deal, honor and money mixing up in a cocktail that turn sour. Indeed, the methods aren't satisfying for any of the two parties, the Oriental woman still gets her revenge, as if being deprived from external territory was still les hurtful than the internal ne. And ironically, the bargain will cost Robert's fortune, preventing him from buying a new land after the acquittal. Orient triumphs and Occident fails, which is a moral ending, but not the cynical "happy" conclusion of the play. The problem with "The Letter" is that its ending doesn't feel much like a moral victory of the Orient but a rather weak surrendering to the Code.
Because, even by admitting that Leslie would still love the man she killed (then why did she kill him?), and by accepting that she let herself being killed by the widow, as a sort of redeeming arc-closing act, then was it necessary to have the killers being arrested? Crimes and adultery shouldn't get unpunished according to the Code but not when ruining an ending becomes a case of cinematic offense.
First, the opening killing in some tropical colony, gunshots heard off screen, a man stumbling to his death and Bette Davis standing behind a gun pointed at him. Then there was that nightmarishly stone-faced Asian woman, played by Gale Sondergaard. And finally, maybe the moment I was looking forward the most to, when a suave Occidentalized Asian man disappears between two luxurious cars; the sound of a closing door makes us expect to see him driving one of them, but it's actually a jalopy half their size that emerges between, leaving a thick dust of smoke.
That gag worthy of a Warner cartoon and yet coming from Wyler, speaks as eloquently as the other images I just described: yhey're all about the Asian setting, the plantation the plantation where indigenous manservants witness the death of a White men killed by a rich White women, the man's widow wearing traditional clothes as to assert her rejection of the Occident and whose hurt pride is engraved in her face like a death threat on a tombstone, and finally the clerk who speaks perfect English, does his best to accommodate and yet whose car is hilariously dwarfed by the others.
There's such a good mixture of patronizing respect and colonial contempt that forges the intercultural relationships within the film that if anything, the ending, while tying the plot together, should have tied both these cultural issues as well. The problem is that the film was made in 1940, one year shy away from a double revolution: "Citizen Kane" and "The Maltese Falcon". What have these movies got in common? They had flawed protagonists who get a moral comeuppance that still, didn't moralize the audience. These narrative patterns made possible by the noir-genre and the rise of antiheroic figures could challenge the Hays Code.
Unfortunately, movies like "The Letter", for all the competence of director William Wyler, actors Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson, composer Max Steiner and a hypnotic black-and-white cinematography, couldn't get away with the ending that made the original play written by Sommerset Maughan a critical success. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the ending "weak", blaming it on the Code and I couldn't have said it better, the film had all the makings of a pre-noir masterpiece but it failed at the last minute, after ninety made of sheer greatness.
It opens with what seems to be a "what have I done moment?" when we see Leslie Crosby (Davis) standing with a shock and bewildered face behind her victim. Then husband Robert (Marshall) comes with his lawyer and friend Howard (Stephenson). Leslie explains that the man tried to abuse her and she defended herself. Still, there's something very matter-of-factly in her narration, she doesn't even try. She's twice confident about her husband's blind and having law on her side to get off the hook in both matters. The lady is a paradox, unconscious and calculating, good enough an actress to memorize a perfect alibi but not so good that it doesn't raise Stephenson's suspicion.
The lawyer smells something fishy in that self-defense story and Crosby's casualness didn't help not to mention the way she emptied her gun as if she was more trying to silence him than avenging her offended honor. Wyler isn't oblivious to our doubts and without further waiting, the next scene, a charming and scene-stealing clerk tells Howard about the existence of a a letter that might incriminate Leslie, proving that Hammond's visit wasn't unexpected. The letter is in Hammond's Eurasian wife's hands and she won't sell it cheaply. The plot isn't a masterstroke of complexity but Wyler can unveil characters' most complex emotional struggles just by the use of a camera.
Wyler's use of silences, of lights and shadows can say al lot more than Howard Koch's screenplay, in Bette Davis' eyes, we can sense the moments where her confidence is cornered by a too inquisitive question, in Stephenson's pauses and hesitations we witness the moral dilemma of a man compromising his own ethics to protect a murderess. Even in the crucial letter's exchange, Wyler heightens the tension with long close up on knives, chimes, on the Asian woman's threatening glare that might say she's not taking the bargain as an end, the action lingers on small and seemingly meaningless details but it does so with a powerful intensity. So from a simple and straightforward plot, Wyler provides deep understandings of the gap between the Occidental and the Oriental world.
We have silence being bought like a commercial deal, honor and money mixing up in a cocktail that turn sour. Indeed, the methods aren't satisfying for any of the two parties, the Oriental woman still gets her revenge, as if being deprived from external territory was still les hurtful than the internal ne. And ironically, the bargain will cost Robert's fortune, preventing him from buying a new land after the acquittal. Orient triumphs and Occident fails, which is a moral ending, but not the cynical "happy" conclusion of the play. The problem with "The Letter" is that its ending doesn't feel much like a moral victory of the Orient but a rather weak surrendering to the Code.
Because, even by admitting that Leslie would still love the man she killed (then why did she kill him?), and by accepting that she let herself being killed by the widow, as a sort of redeeming arc-closing act, then was it necessary to have the killers being arrested? Crimes and adultery shouldn't get unpunished according to the Code but not when ruining an ending becomes a case of cinematic offense.