Love Letters (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 21) I watched a couple of films I’d never seen before on Turner Classic Movies, the 1945 romantic drama Love Letters and the 1926 silent film La Bohème. Love Letters was one of Hal B. Wallis’s first productions after he left Warner Bros. in 1943 over a battle with Jack Warner on the production credits of the film Casablanca (when Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jack Warner as studio head bolted from his chair and grabbed the award before Wallis, the actual producer, could get it) and set up a semi-independent company to make his films with Paramount as the releasing studio. For his story he bought a novel called Pity My Simplicity by British author Christopher Massie whose plot seems to be pieced together, Frankenstein Monster-style, from Édmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, James Hilton’s Random Harvest (with the genders reversed) and Vera Caspary’s Laura. To adapt Massie’s novel into a film script Wallis hired Ayn Rand, of all people, though blessedly this film is free from her political, economic and sexual obsessions. (I told that to my husband Charles when he emerged from the bedroom about 20 minutes into it, and he said, “So Ayn Rand was just another hack!”) He also picked William (nè Wilhelm) Dieterle as director and went to David O. Selznick’s contract list for his two stars, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.

The plot begins in Italy during the last days of World War II, when Roger Morland (Robert Sully) asks one of his fellow soldiers, Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten), to write letters in his name to his girlfriend Victoria Remington (Jennifer Jones) in the small village of Longreach in central England. Victoria falls in love with Roger but only through the letters Alan actually wrote, and though we don’t see any of this happening until a flashback at the very end, the boorish Roger turns Victoria off and she can’t reconcile the haunting, romantic tone of “Roger”’s letters with his crude, nasty reality. Then the war ends and Alan returns home to England and his parents (Lumsden Hare and Winifred Harris). He learns that his Aunt Dagmar (whom we never see as an on-screen character, though there’s a still photo of her) has just died and left him her country estate, which is filled with his boyhood possessions as well as 10 gold sovereigns Dagmar told him to give to his wife if and when he marries. Alan has a sort-of fiancée, Helen Wentworth (Anita Louise), but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that Alan is no longer in love with her because he’s haunted by the memory of Victoria. Alan meets Victoria’s friend Dilly Carson (Ann Richards, whom both MGM and Paramount tried to give a star buildup to that didn’t take; she’s a fine actress but not one with star quality) and blurts out the story of himself, Roger, Victoria and the letters when he gets drunk and starts talking to himself for half an hour. Unbeknownst to Alan, Victoria is actually at the party, though she’s caught amnesia and has totally forgotten everything about herself, including her identity and the fact that she and Roger actually did get married and then he died, not in the war but in an “accident.” Later Alan hears that Victoria is also dead and he starts dating a woman named “Singleton” – no other name. We know that “Singleton” is really Victoria, but Alan is clueless (he’d never seen a photo of Victoria, so he had no idea what she looked like – one would have thought she’d have sent a picture of herself to Roger, but no-o-o-o-o).

Alan goes through a wedding ceremony with Singleton, but during the ceremony she slips and calls him “Roger” for reasons of which she has no idea. The two move into the home Alan inherited from the dead Aunt Dagmar, and the film – which up until then has been so dull both Charles and I were having trouble staying awake – suddenly becomes more interesting as Alan patiently works with Singleton to try to jog her memory and help her regain awareness of who and what she is. Alan even buys Singleton an MG sports car (and I admired Paramount’s technical staff for remembering that the British drive on the left side of the road and their cars come with steering wheels on the right side; once I encountered a British tourist on a bus who said he could drive but didn’t want to in the U.S. because it would have been too difficult for him to accommodate to driving on the “wrong” side of the road and then go back to left-hand driving when he got back home), though he drives it because he has no idea whether or not she can drive. One day the two are driving through the British countryside when Singleton sees a road sign pointing to Longreach and demands Alan take her there. When they get there, the house she grew up in turns out to be occupied by two British rustics who work for Singleton’s adoptive mother, Beatrice Remington (Gladys Cooper in one of her delightfully vicious old-lady characterizations).

Alan takes Singleton on a picnic and she spills some sort of red fruit juice on her hand. She wipes it on her white dress, and this immediately flashes her back to how her late husband Roger really died: he was knifed to death and she picked up the knife and got his blood on her hands. Because of this, the police arrested her and she was tried for the murder, though all we get of this are a few fragmentary flashbacks showing her under police custody during a break in the trial. Then Beatrice Remington tells her the whole story of how Roger died: they had a confrontation in which Roger burned all of the letters Alan had written Victoria in Roger’s name, telling her he was tired of living in another man’s shadow. Victoria had a hissy-fit over their destruction and tried to save the letters from the fireplace. Roger came up from behind her with murderous intent, but Beatrice saved her life by coming up from behind Roger and stabbing him. Later, though, Victoria handled the knife and got blood on her hands from it, and that’s why the cops suspected her of Roger’s murder. Alan happens to come on the scene while Beatrice is telling this story, and he finally realizes that he married Victoria after all and the two return to Alan’s home and presumably live happily ever after.

For some reason the Wikipedia page on Love Letters describes it as a film noir, which it definitely is not – though it does have a few nicely Gothic shots of all those old, decaying British manses from ace cinematographer Lee Garmes. It’s just a creepy (in both senses of the word) romantic melodrama set in an unbelievable rendition of the British countryside, and Dieterle directs dutifully but dully. Jennifer Jones seems way too young for her part – Alan decides that she’s 23 but she came off much more like a teenager to me – and during the movie I joked to Charles that if Ayn Rand had had her head she’d have had Alan restore Victoria’s memories by raping her. (All of Ayn Rand’s sex scenes involve a strong, dominating woman being raped into psychological and sexual submission by an even stronger, more dominating man. It’s obvious that was a personal fantasy for her.) Love Letters was both a commercial and a critical success at the time, though I think the latter was because Hal Wallis was obviously going for Quality with a capital “Q,” arranging for major stars and a top-flight director as well as a story that would impress Academy voters (which it did; Love Letters was up for four Oscars, including Jennifer Jones’ third consecutive Best Actress nomination, though it didn’t win any). It doesn’t age very well, though, and I think it’s because the whole conception of the mystery woman as flotsam in the hands of the strong, powerful man seems unbearably sexist and just icky today. The main theme from Victor Young’s score for Love Letters was turned into a pop song to promote the film (with lyrics by the “Body and Soul” guy, Edward Heyman), and in 1957 Nat “King” Cole and Gordon Jenkins made an incomparable recording of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy4jDt6bkG8) for Cole’s album Love Is the Thing that’s a good deal better than the movie itself! There’s also a gospel-soul version by another African-American artist, Ketty Lester, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz91zXh30sE.