Bette Davis’ eyes don’t really need any help calling attention to themselves, so director William Wyler and cinematographer Tony Gaudio are somewhat piling it on when, on multiple occasions, they use the conceit of a full moon to spotlight her eyes in The Letter. Yet that’s also in keeping with the heightened atmosphere of this humid crime drama, based on a W. Somerset Maugham play.
Davis plays Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a rubber plantation manager in British Malay. As the movie opens, Leslie chases a man out of her jungle bungalow with a gun, eventually shooting him dead. The Malay workers, roused from their bunks, gather around in shock, then send for Leslie’s husband, Robert (Herbert Marshall). He soon arrives with his lawyer (James Stephenson) and a police detective (Bruce Lester), who hear Leslie’s story: Geoff Hammond, the dead man and an acquaintance of the Crosbies, had shown up unannounced and “tried to make love to me.” Her only choice was to grab her husband’s gun and kill Hammond in self-defense.
Stephenson’s lawyer sniffs something is amiss, as do we, so it’s no spoiler to say that The Letter soon reveals the ugly truth about Leslie—including the lengths she’ll go to hide it. This might be one of Bette Davis’ least sympathetic parts, which is saying something. It’s not just the infidelity we eventually learn about, nor even the killing, but the cockiness with which Leslie carries herself throughout the proceedings, even after she’s put in jail while awaiting trial. “I’m looking forward to it,” she shrugs when asked if she’s nervous about testifying. Leslie’s least appealing attribute is the way she appears to be unbothered by the whole thing. (Conversely, that’s one of Davis’ most appealing attributes as an actress.)
The Letter, it should be said, is a strange watch in the era of “believe women,” which rightly emphasizes the urgency of taking abuse and assault claims seriously. This is almost the opposite. Leslie is the figure of power and privilege here, already assumed to be in danger by the fact that she’s often alone in her bungalow with all those “natives” lurking about. She’s pre-victimized by colonial racism, so how could she ever be a perpetrator?
Watching Leslie order the plantation workers about in that opening scene is reminiscent of an earlier Wyler film starring Davis: Jezebel. There, she played a belle in 1852 New Orleans who at one point orders the enslaved people on her family plantation to sing as a way to needle an abolitionist rival. Just as Wyler’s camera made space for the Black characters in Jezebel, he also gives plenty of room in The Letter to Ong Chi Seng (Sen Yung), the Malay assistant to Stephenson’s lawyer. It’s Ong who serves as the go-between when the dead man’s widow, who is part Malay herself, reveals an incriminating letter from Leslie to her late husband and demands a ransom for it. With a foot in each cultural world, Ong suddenly holds unexpected power, and he carries it with an insinuating obsequiousness: bowing as before, but also making eye contact more directly than usual; servile, but in a mocking way. The colonizers still need him, but this time it’s on his terms.
Not as progressive is the casting of Gale Sondergaard as the “Eurasian” widow, Mrs. Hammond. Sondergaard sports grotesque eye makeup and delivers a stern, pursed performance; it’s ugly, in more ways than one. And yet the movie’s showcase sequence is the showdown between her and Leslie, when they meet to exchange the money for the letter. With that moonlight splitting through the slats of the blinds and a breeze tinkling through a set of windchimes, Leslie enters the room shrouded in lace, like an innocent. Then, through another doorway strung with beads, Mrs. Hammond appears, darkly dressed and imposing, those chimes bleeding into the increasingly abstract score by Max Steiner.
Leslie gets her letter, but that doesn’t mean she gets away with it. I won’t detail her comeuppance, except to say that it’s eerily staged under more moonlight. I will note that The Letter is bookended by two Leslie soliloquies: her first account of the killing, where she is calm and composed, and a climactic confession, where she’s frantic and nearly deranged. The irony of the latter moment is that in finally telling the truth, Leslie is still lying to herself.
