The Letter (Warner Bros., First National, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 11) I got tired of the MS-NBC coverage of the killing of Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and put on one of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: The Letter (1940), directed by William Wyler from a screenplay by Howard Koch based on a 1927 play by W. Somerset Maugham. The Letter had begun life as a short story Maugham published in 1926 as part of a collection called The Casuarina Tree, and in 1927 it was produced on stage in London with Gladys Cooper as the adulterous Leslie Crosbie, wife of a rubber plantation manager in Singapore, who kills her lover and then claims that she did so in self-defense when he tried to rape her. Nigel Bruce played the cuckolded husband, Robert Crosbie, and the play was later produced on Broadway, also in 1927, with Katharine Cornell as Leslie, J. W. Austin as Robert, and Allan Jeayes as Howard Joyce, an attorney and family friend of the Crosbies who agrees to represent her at trial. The Letter was first filmed as an early talkie by Paramount in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels as Leslie, Reginald Owen as Robert, and Herbert Marshall as Geoff Hammond (Leslie’s extra-relational partner until she kills him). My husband Charles watched both the Jeanne Eagels version of 1929 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-letter-paramount-1929.html) and the Bette Davis version of 1940 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-letter-warner-bros-1940.html) back to back on January 11, 2013, and I was quite impressed with the Eagels version.

The careers of Jeanne Eagels and Bette Davis track rather closely. Both got their big breaks from the veteran British actor George Arliss, Eagels in the U.S. stage premiere of Arliss’s vehicle Disraeli (1927) and Davis in the film The Man Who Played God (1932). Both of Eagels’s two sound films, The Letter and Jealousy (1929), were remade with Davis (though Davis’s version of Jealousy was retitled Deception), and Davis won her first Academy Award for the 1935 film Dangerous, directed by Alfred E. Green from a script by Laird Doyle, in which she played a character loosely based on Eagels. TCM showed the 1940 The Letter as part of a night in which they were paying tribute to William Wyler during which they also showed her earlier film with Davis, Jezebel (1938), as well as the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s novel, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. For the Davis version of The Letter Herbert Marshall got promoted to the role of her husband, and while the confrontation between Leslie and her lover was played on-screen in 1929, in 1940 we just saw a shadowy figure on the Crosbies’ veranda as Leslie plugged him with all six shots in her revolver. The 1940 The Letter was also listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia (Davis’s only other listing was for Beyond the Forest, made in 1950 and a film Davis particularly disliked; it was her last movie as a Warner Bros. contract player and she was anxious to leave the studio and go through what she called a “professional divorce”), and it qualifies both thematically and visually. Certainly Leslie Crosbie counts as a femme fatale in the most literal sense, and the slithery atmospherics created by Wyler and his cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, have the so-called “German look” that came to define film noir.

This time around I was particularly concentrating on the quite good supporting players. Attorney Howard Joyce was played by James Stephenson, a former British stage actor who’d got his start in films in middle age, making his screen debut in a British “quota quickie” called The Perfect Crime (1937) for Warner Bros.’ British studio at Teddington. These were ultra-cheap movie made on the quick because British law specified that any company seeking to import American films into their country had to release a certain percentage of British product as well – so the studios, some of which were subsidiaries of U.S. companies and some of which were independent, made especially cheap movies to meet the quota to get the legal right to show American films in Britain. In 1938 Jack Warner saw potential in Stephenson and brought him to America to work for the parent company, and Warner gave Stephenson a careful build-up including putting him in two earlier Bette Davis movies, The Old Maid (1938) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). In 1940 they gave Stephenson the plum role of Howard Joyce in The Letter, which won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and also cast him in a lead as Philo Vance in Calling Philo Vance, a remake of The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Alas, in 1941 Stephenson suddenly died of a heart attack at age 48. Gale Sondergaard turns in an excellent performance as the widow of Geoff Hammond, the guy Leslie killed in the opening scene because having found true love in the half-Chinese woman he’d married, he no longer wanted anything to do with Leslie anymore. Stephenson is excellent as the attorney wracked not only by professional fear but personal guilt as he becomes part of Leslie’s scheme to buy back the incriminating letter she wrote Hammond the night of his murder imploring him to come see her at once. He’s all too aware that he’s breaking the law himself, and by suborning Leslie’s willingness to pay Mrs. Hammond for the letter he’s risking not only disbarment but prison.

Also unusually good in the supporting cast is Victor Sen Yung as Ong Chi Seng, Mrs. Hammond’s go-between in the negotiations over the letter and also her interpreter, since she speaks only Chinese and Malay. Most of the time Sen Yung was wasted in the thoroughly silly part of Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son, forced to act like a comic-relief doofus compared to Sidney Toler’s Chan (when Warner Oland died in 1938, Keye Luke, who’d played Number One Son in Oland’s Chan movies, quit the part rather than play it opposite a different actor as Chan). In The Letter he got the part of his life and he was clearly eating it up. From his appearance on the scene bearing a hand-written copy of the letter and announcing that unless Joyce buys it for Leslie he will turn it over to the prosecution and it will sink Leslie’s self-defense claim to the great scene in which Leslie actually journeys to the Chinese part of town to buy the letter and Mrs. Hammond makes clear her utter contempt for this white woman who knocked off her husband and seems like she’s going to get away with it, Sen Yung is utterly marvelous. The Letter does suffer from a Production Code-mandated ending which quite takes the edge off Leslie’s final line in the play (and in the 1929 film) in which she confesses to her husband, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” In his outro, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that Davis and Wyler had argued about this line: Davis had wanted to speak it looking away from Herbert Marshall, but Wyler pulled rank and insisted that she say it to his face. Once Leslie and Robert have their final confrontation, Howard Joyce and his wife Dorothy (Frieda Inescort) host a big party for the Crosbies with a large dance floor and an orchestra playing the era’s pop music. Leslie gets bored and goes for a walk – and as she leaves she finds a dagger has been left at her front door. Later she’s mugged by one of Mrs. Hammond’s assistants (someone we previously saw in the background of the blackmail scenes) and Mrs. Hammond stabs her with the ceremonial dagger. Wyler and Koch appropriately played this scene without any dialogue, just Max Steiner’s superbly atmospheric music and Gaudio’s rich chiaroscuro visuals (The Letter is one of those films that makes you wonder why anybody thought the movies ever needed color), but Wyler’s virtuoso filmmaking can’t make up for the absurdity of the closing scene and its overall irrelevance. It’s just there because the movie censors had decreed that Leslie Crosbie had to be punished for her crime, and her own lingering sense of guilt and frustration weren’t punishment enough for what she’d done.