The Letter (1940) One of the First Hollywood Noir

Directed by William Wyler (Hell's Heroes (1929), Dead End (1937), Detective Story (1951), and The Desperate Hours (1955) 

Written by Howard Koch and W. Somerset Maugham based on his play. Cinematography was by Tony Gaudio and Music by Max Steiner. 

The film stars Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie, Herbert Marshall as Robert Crosbie, James Stephenson as Howard Joyce, Frieda Inescort as Dorothy Joyce, Gale Sondergaard as Mrs. Hammond, Bruce Lester as John Withers, Elizabeth Earl as Adele Ainsworth, Cecil Kellaway as Prescott, Sen Yung as Ong Chi Seng, Doris Lloyd as Mrs. Cooper, Willie Fung as Chung Hi, Tetsu Komai as Head Boy.

 Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie

 

Herbert Marshall as Robert Crosbie

 James Stephenson as Howard Joyce

Gale Sondergaard as Mrs. Hammond

Sen Yung as Ong Chi Seng

Observations:

This film was produced at Warner Brothers Burbank Studios in May 1940. It was totally set bound. It used Soundstages 1,7, 16, and 24. William Wyler was a director for 45 years dating from a 1925 silent short called The Crook Buster. He filmed all Genres.  My favorite films of his are The Westerner (1939) and his ten year earlier Western, Hell's Heroes (1929) a Western that shows a lot of grit and style. Wyler insisted on filming Hells Heroes all on location, in The ghost town of Bodie, in Panamint Valley and the Mojave Desert, in August with temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Wyler also directed Dead End (1937) and it could also be seen as another early Noir. Another interesting tidbit, both The Letter and Dead End were based on stage plays.

The Letter's cinematographer Tony Gaudio started as a still photographer. He notably lensed Little Caesar and other Gangster Films, The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938, and a number of Tropical/Oriental Adventures (The Mask of Fu Manchu, Mandalay, The Narrow Corner), so he had experience with both the Gangster Film and the Tropical Film aesthetic. 

The last piece of puzzle was the Warner Brother Studios crew of stage craftsmen under the Art Direction of Carl Jules Weyl. In the Visual Noir vein we are examining, Weyl also worked on the "look" of Casablanca (1942).

So here is another case where, just like with I Wake Up Screaming, there were no German war  émigrés involved in any major capacity that would have effected the films look, and electricity rationing for the war effort hadn't yet begun, so there were no restraints on lighting. It looks like the Visual Noir Style look could be just by chance resulting from a combo of the following factors. 

The tropial set story takes place mostly in a rubber plantation bungalow. The tropic bungalow is designed for maximum cross ventilation to be as cool as possible. This means it has as many windows in its outside walls as possible. These windows are all louvered, the outside doors and the interior doors are also all louvered. Combine that with a story that takes place mostly at night with a screenplay that emphasises full moonlight and you get a lot of lighting setups that are naturally going to have an abundance of palm frond and louver shadows thrown by not only the moon but also by any interior lights. Added to that is another staple of tropical settings, fans. Ceiling fans, wall fans, desktop fans, all throwing additional shadows adding to the atmosphere.

The stylistic tropical visuals plus a dark story = NOIR. 

The Story

This Noir starts off with a bang. Evening. Full moon. Plantation No 1. Diamond "L" Rubber Company. A lethargic camera pan across a equatorial bucolic backdrop. 

Rubber trees, Hevea brasiliensis. Diagonal cuts dip  “caoutchouc” latex into collection "cups."  A tropical bamboo bunkhouse. The Chinese and Malay laborers of a rubber plantation are shown in various states of lackadaisical relaxation. A  mahjong game, others play native music. Still others are snoozing in their hammocks. A cockatoo roosts peacefully on a fence.

A gunshot coming from the managers bungalow, startles the bird. A man stumbles out of a louvered door.  A second shot, louder now wakes the workers. The man from the bungalow staggers down the steps falling to the ground. 

A woman emerges. She is holding a revolver. She points at the prone man and pulls the trigger emptying the gun at him. A cacophony of various languages. We get a close up of the woman. Leslie Crosbie. Managers wife. The dead man is Geoff Hammond. 

The Headman is sent to fetch Robert Crosbie, Leslie's husband. Robert, his attorney, Howard Joyce and British police inspector, interview Leslie. Leslie tells them that Hammond tried to rape her and that she shot him.

Going to look at the body

Leslie is put under arrest and the rest of the film is her trial and the discovery by Ong Chi Seng, Joyce's law clerk, of the existence of a letter written by Leslie summoning Hammond to the bungalow. The letter is in the possession of Hammond's  Eurasian wife. The letter threatens Hammond if he did not show up. The widow demands $10,000 pounds sterling and that Leslie personally hand it over face to face.

Of course this sends the story down the road to Noirsville.

Noirsville   

After the initial opening BANG it turns into a meller, more a Woman's Noir than what most average newbie Noiristas and Aficio-Noir-dos are used to. It play's to emotions and the realities of being a Woman. Statistically, the majority of violent crimes are committed by men. Noirs that tell womans stories would be more about vice, embezzlement, bunko schemes, confidence swindles, drug addictions, mental illness, competition with rivals, lovers quarrels, infidelity, etc.  

Bette Davis is Bette Davis and comports herself well as you would expect. In the novel Hammond's wife is Chinese. You kind of don't have to guess what made the studio's change her into a less offensive (to miscegenation racists) Eurasian, but then they have Gale Sondergaard playing the part in yellowface and as the cliché stoic "Dragon Lady" anyway. What is up with that?  Well, we can guess what's up with that, but if you haven't seen the film you will have to rectify that. A Meller Noir, for me a 7/10.

Critical response

In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther observed, "The ultimate credit for as taut and insinuating a melodrama as has come along this year — a film which extenuates tension like a grim inquisitor's rack—must be given to Mr. Wyler. His hand is patent throughout . . . Miss Davis is a strangely cool and calculating killer who conducts herself with reserve and yet implies a deep confusion of emotions . . . Only the end of The Letter is weak — and that is because of the postscript which the Hays Office has compelled".

Variety magazine wrote, "Never has [the W. Somerset Maugham play] been done with greater production values, a better all-around cast or finer direction. Its defect is its grimness. Director William Wyler, however, sets himself a tempo which is in rhythm with the Malay locale . . . Davis' frigidity at times seems to go even beyond the characterization. On the other hand, Marshall never falters. Virtually stealing these honors in the pic, however, is Stephenson as the attorney, while Sondergaard is the perfect mask-like threat".

Time Out London says, "A superbly crafted melodrama, even if it never manages to top the moody montage with which it opens - moon scudding [sic] behind clouds, rubber dripping from a tree, coolies dozing in the compound, a startled cockatoo - as a shot rings out, a man staggers out onto the verandah, and Davis follows to empty her gun grimly into his body . . . [The] camerawork, almost worthy of Sternberg in its evocation of sultry Singapore nights and cool gin slings, is not matched by natural sounds (on the soundtrack Max Steiner's score does a lot of busy underlining)."

The film holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 15 reviews, with an average rating of 8.40/10

(From IMDb)

The production code versus production values

AlsExGal20 March 2017

Warning: Spoilers

This 1940 version of the film was made eleven years after the first sound version, but for what the film had to give up due to the production code, it more than made up in production values that weren't even possible in the 1929 version.

The production code version of The Letter is the slow peeling of a woman's plea of self-defense against an attempted rape into the cold-blooded murder of a lover who has become bored with her. Yes Bette Davis' Leslie Crosbie is peeled like an onion, but no tears are necessary.

Everyone fawns and gushes over Leslie and her plight of being arrested for the murder of a man who tried to rape her. The only one NOT falling all over himself over her is her lawyer. Howard Joyce (played by James Stephenson) has a rather cold, hard look like a leading man worthy of acting opposite the Warner Queen. He stands toe to toe with her. He asks questions that cast just a slight doubt as to the veracity of her story. He talks to the cop and asks him if attacking a woman sounds like Hammond's m.o. since he seemed to be a ladies' man. There's just enough doubt there give us pause.

I could talk about the lawyer's assistant who is intent on using blood money to subvert justice and rob an innocent husband, all so he can build his own law practice. Gale Sondegard's Eurasian widow never wanted the money, she just wanted the face off with Leslie. She has her own ideas of how to deal with her husband's death and it doesn't involve juries or blackmail. But, let's face it, Bette Davis owns this film. Slowly she reveals her true self and the truth of the events. Then she becomes the Legend we know her to be. She has a self-assured answer for everything until her lawyer brings up the letter. It's all in those Bette Davis eyes. She needs time to remember (to lie, she means). She faints when she runs out of excuses. Look at her tactic: she mentions how all of this will affect her husband. It's like a guy trying to get his wife to stay for the sake of the children. Her lawyer is her husband's close friend, and she correctly figures he'll do anything to protect the husband.

Now let's talk about Wyler's direction, particularly in that opening scene. Wyler could have used a series of cuts to show various aspects of the workers, but the flowing camera tells us that everything is connected together. It's almost like cause and effect. First the rubber tree, then those who work to harvest the trees, and only then the dramas of the owners. When you look at the film closely, you can't help but be impressed by Wyler's direction, which works hand in hand with Max Steiner's haunting score.

Now I'm also a big fan of the 1929 version of The Letter. But that film was made at the dawn of sound and is almost like this one in reverse. First the truth about Leslie Crosbie, then the subterfuge. In both cases her last words are the same - "With all my heart I still love the man I killed". But in this film it is the regret of a woman who realizes she is not good enough for her husband who loves and forgives her. In the 1929 version they are the words of a woman acquitted who is telling her bitter husband "If I am stuck with you, YOU are equally stuck with ME".

Watch this one. Over and over. You'll always catch something you missed before.