#8 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.
William Wyler goes full noir in this remake of the film of the same name made by Jean de Limur and based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham, and the results are really fun, noirish action. It’s a look into depravity in an exotic locale with great writing and great performances. It’s nice to see Wyler elevate his material once again after making several, merely good, films leading up to it. It kind of feels like Wyler slumming it by going to Warner and falling in a bit with their house style with similar results as to when Orson Welles decided to slum it with his noir, The Lady from Shanghai.
The movie begins with a relatively famous opening tracking shot that pushes in and around for a couple of minutes, ending with Leslie Crosbie (Better Davis) coming out of her rubber plantation house in Malaya to shoot Geoffrey Hammond six times until he’s dead. This ignites interest among the servants around the plantation leading to the arrival of the police, the Crosbie family lawyer, Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), and Leslie’s husband Robert (Herbert Marshall). All together, Leslie tells her story about how Geoffrey came to the house, leaving his car down the road with a story about not wanting to wake anyone up, and an awkward conversation that led to an attempted rape. This led to Leslie grabbing the gun that Robert keeps around the house and shooting the man until he was dead, even if he was lying facedown on the ground for the final four shots or so. Everyone easily believes her story because of her reputation and Geoffrey’s reputation as a ladies man, but the formalities must be followed in a civil society. In accordance with that ethos, they take Leslie to the attorney general to place her under arrest pending a trial.
There’s an interesting little idea running through pretty much the entire movie, and it’s about this interaction between colonial powers and the native colonial populations. There are a handful of smaller parts, mostly support to the main cast, that are always on the edge of frame or the scene. Mainly it’s Ong (Sen Yung), Joyce’s assistant who drives a noticeably smaller car (there are a lot of visual contrasts between the size and wealth of the possessions of the colonialists and the native population), and Geoffrey’s new wife (Gale Sondergaard), a Chinese national (who doesn’t look all that Chinese, to be honest, weird, huh?), who ends up being in possession of the eponymous letter.
That letter, a note from Leslie to Geoffrey dated the morning of Geoffrey’s murder, threatens to undo everything about her case, and the film really begins to focus on Joyce. It’s more of a character piece between Joyce trying to do his utmost duty to his client and his profession hitting up against the reality of Leslie’s infidelity and Leslie herself, as his client. This is a tight moral question about legal ethics, but it’s also a bit lurid in its presentation, helping it fit the noir conventions of the Warner Bros studio. Instead of limiting it to debates of rhetoric (there are a couple here and there to help set the scene), it’s about going into the heart of the Chinese part of town to make a trade involving a lot of money, taken from Robert under his intentionally partial understanding of the situation, and the letter. It’s the rich, colonial powers walking into the den of native powers, and it’s a great sequence of tension with a wonderful exotic flare.
The film becomes a courtroom drama for a quick moment, and I really appreciate how quickly it’s dismissed. It completely skips the trial, relying entirely on Joyce’s final argument to the jury to hinge its dramatic developments on, but the film doesn’t end with the trial. The drama isn’t inherent to the trial but in the relationships between the characters, and there’s more to play out afterwards. And what plays out afterwards is just the unmasking of truth about Leslie, and it’s a destructive series of events that hurt everyone around her. It’s a compelling portrait of destruction.
Once again, it becomes somewhat repetitive to keep mentioning the high-quality performances in a Wyler production, as well as his visual sense, but it continues here as well. That opening shot is the obvious hero here, but the film is once again filled with intelligent compositions filled with actors doing their utmost with a special note for Stephenson, a low-rung actor that Jack Warner wanted to give a shot, Wyler agreed, and then Warner wanted Wyler to drop. He is a very strong presence up against Davis, operating as the moral center of the story. He stands against Davis, his sense of worth tied up in his professional duties and his sudden need to lie to keep his client free from the grasp of the law.
It’s a ripper of a noir. Well-made by Wyler, well-lensed by Tony Gaudio, giving us heavy shadows all over the place, and well-acted by everyone involved. It’s Wyler walking into Warner Bros and making something in their style at the same level as the best of their house directors, sort of like how Howard Hawks would walk into new studios and genres with one go and make some of the best examples. Wyler was predominantly known for pristinely made dramas, but his forays into other genres proved he could walk in and master anything else. From the Lubitsch-like The Good Fairy to this noir, William Wyler proved that he could bend to any genre with expert precision. He really knew what he was doing in this whole cinema thing.
Rating: 4/4
David Vining, Author 
One thought on “The Letter”