Cast: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall

Director: William Wyler

Screenplay: Howard Koch

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir



CRITIQUE:


Bette Davis glitteringly radiates in this dark, noirish drama The Letter, set in the harsh plantations of the Orient. Singapore, to be precise. It’s a performance that defies categorisations: her Leslie Crosbie is neither a full-on, raging bitch nor a blameless middle-class housewife. As the stunningly staged opener harbours (kudos to William Wyler’s taut and stylish direction), everything is not what it seems. A door bursts open and a woman comes out, firing ferocious bullets into a man. This is Leslie, a British expatriate’s wife, and she spends the entirety of the film feigning for her innocence of the murder. There are wondrous tics to her personality; she demonstrates a finely clocked narrative in the investigation scenes, a white kerchief in a hand, and then faints on the floor when verbally rounded up in a corner. She’s surreptitious, cold, damnably calculating – and sometimes, with its audience almost sympathising for her smothered domestic existence. The complexity of this performance rise up above many other in Davis’ entire gallery of work, powerfully restrained and glove-fit, precisely measured. Set aside a somewhat less thrilling middle-half, as it turns into a courtroom drama, it’s more effective as a character study, drawing a portrait of a virago. There is a scene where Leslie faces her match in Gale Sondergaard’s Mrs Hammond, a wordless face-off, Davis draped in a virginal white knitwork and Sondergaard in tiger-like stare as the former bends down on the floor, the latter twitches as though in an animalistic instinct to leap and claw the other to death.


VERDICT:

Wyler's camerawork glides effortlessly and his direction is impeccable in this noirish South-Asian backdrop, guiding The Letter from a showstopping opener to a solid conclusion. But this is really Bette Davis' show, drawing a performance within a performance, a rotten, calculating bitch masquerading as a middle-class housewife. A technically ingenuous piece of acting.



RATING: A-