The Letter

Nighttime on a rubber plantation, Southeastern Malaysia.  Far-off music plays as the camera glides toward the plantation house, an examplar of Pacific colonial architecture with slatted windows and a wide veranda.  You can practically feel the humidity.  You can practically smell the frangipani.

BANG!  A man staggers out of the house and onto the veranda.  A young Bette Davis, gun in hand, follows.  BANG!  BANG!  The man falls to the ground.  BANG!  BANG!  BANG!

And we’re off.

The Letter features Bette Davis in one of her strongest performances: a woman who shoots a man in cold blood and, because of her status relative to his and her confidence in the chumminess of a colonial judiciary, expects to get away with it.  She’s everything her position, and her actions, demands and requires that she be: fragile, tough, honest, devious, innocent, and deadly.  She’s a moving target, a woman who’ll let you think you have her figured out until her best interests dictate otherwise.

James Stephenson plays her ally, her adversary, her attorney, her mirror.  All that Davis hides behind her controlled façade, he emotes through his more studied, yet more forthcoming, visage.  A quick internet search tells me Stephenson earned an Oscar nomination for his performance, and further research shows that this roll kicked his career into overdrive –for one year, because the poor guy died of a heart attack in 1941, just one year after The Letter’s release.

As for the film, well, it has its flaws.  Its mechanisms can seem a bit mechanical, and the style of acting in vogue at the time of its production creates more a sense of big-D Drama than real people facing tough choices.  Nevertheless, it evokes the romance of the colonial Pacific like no other film, Davis and Stephenson earn the ticket price all by themselves, and you may very well keep guessing right up until the final scene. 

The Letter is a winner.