Letty Lynton (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 1) my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d just got on a Warner Archive Blu-Ray release: Joan Crawford’s 1932 vehicle Letty Lynton. This film was held back from reissue for a truly bizarre reason involving a couple of copyright trolls named Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes, who sued MGM for plagiarism and persuaded a U.S. court to award them one-fifth of MGM’s income from the film. Both sides appealed the judgment, with MGM demanding it be thrown out completely and Sheldon and Barnes demanding all MGM’s income from the film. The play Sheldon and Barnes claimed MGM had ripped off to make Letty Lynton was called Dishonored Lady, and based on my only source – a 1947 film version produced by Hunt Stromberg (also the producer of record for Letty Lynton) for United Artists which so aroused the ire of the Production Code Administration that its screenwriter, Edmund H. North (who four years later got a far more congenial assignment, The Day the Earth Stood Still) – all Letty Lynton and Dishonored Lady have in common is they both feature female leads who are accused of murdering their paramours and manage to work the legal system to avoid prosecution. I’d first heard of Letty Lynton in the mid-1970’s when I bought a paperback edited and compiled by Leonard Maltin based on a magazine he and David Chierichetti had co-edited called Film Fan Monthly. The book featured an article mentioning four Joan Crawford films, two of which were still unavailable from MGM while two had been recently rediscovered. Letty Lynton was one of the two which were still unavailable, and either Maltin or Chierichetti described a long scene in which Crawford quietly leaves the apartment of a man she’s just murdered and compared it to the ending of the second act of Puccini’s opera Tosca. That had led me to assume that the legal difficulties that had led to Letty Lynton’s suppression had come from Puccini’s publisher, Ricordi, a firm so notorious for defending its intellectual property that they once sued Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and David Dreyer because they’d borrowed the instrumental introduction to the aria “É lucevan le stelle,” also from Tosca, for their song “Avalon.” (Like the court in the Letty Lynton/Dishonored Lady case, the court in that case ruled that Puccini and Ricordi should get a percentage of the royalties from “Avalon.”)

The nominal basis for Letty Lynton was a novel of the same title by Marie Belloc Lowndes, sister of French writer Hilaire Belloc and author of 40 novels as well as at least three nonfiction works, one a biography of Edward VII when he was still the Prince of Wales before he became King, and two memoirs. Her best-known work was The Lodger (1913), inspired by a friend who told her she thought she had had Jack the Ripper as one of her neighbors. The Lodger has been filmed five times, most notably in 1926 directed by a young up-and-coming Britisher named Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ivor Novello, who also appeared in a 1933 sound remake directed by Maurice Elvey. In Lowndes’s original book the mystery lodger is indeed Jack the Ripper, while in Hitchcock’s film because producer Michael Balcon didn’t want Ivor Novello, a glamorous male star, to play a murderer he forced Hitchcock and his writer, Eliot Stannard, to change the story and make Novello’s character a man out for revenge against the Ripper for killing his sister. (Hitchcock would have that same problem again 15 years later with his film Suspicion, which in its original form cast Cary Grant as a murderer who poisoned his wife with a spiked glass of milk. The “suits” at RKO demanded it be changed to let Grant be innocent, which Hitchcock responded to with one of the worst-directed scenes in his entire career.)

Letty Lynton begins in Montevideo, Uruguay, with spoiled American heiress Letty Lynton (Joan Crawford) living as the mistress of Continental ne’er-do-well Emile Renaul (Nils Asther). She is determined to leave him and take the next ship to New York in the company of her middle-aged white maid, Miranda (Louise Closser Hale). He is equally determined to keep her, pointing out that she’s tried to leave him several times before and she’s always come back. Nonetheless, she successfully makes it to New York – only to find, to her shock, that Emile is at the dock ready to meet her and take up with her again. Emile beat the ship by flying to New York and even buzzing the ship with his plane. Meanwhile, on board ship Letty has met and fallen genuinely in love with Jerry Darrow (Robert Montgomery), another scion of a rich family whose parents (Walter Walker and Emma Dunn) literally own their own lake as part of an estate in upstate New York. (This is one of many MGM movies that deals with the Depression basically by ignoring it.) Naturally Letty’s biggest concern is keeping the two men in her life from meeting each other, though there’s a telling moment in which Letty is caught by U.S. customs and charged taxes on items imported from South America – and Emile covers the bill. Emile also has a packet of love letters Letty wrote him during their extended on-again off-again affair, and threatens to use them as a weapon against anyone else she might be interested in. Letty’s relationship with Jack lasts long enough for her to be invited to his parents’ upstate estate and view the locals skating on the surface of the family lake. Unfortunately, just before taking the trip with Jerry and his folks, Letty agreed to meet Emile at 8 p.m. one evening in his hotel room. She brought along a bottle of poison (it’s amazing how many movie bathrooms in the classic era had bottles clearly marked “poison”) actually intending to use it to kill herself if Emile wouldn’t let her go. He refuses, and she spikes a glass of wine with the poison, which he drinks.

Though we don’t see him actually consume the poisoned wine, we get a marvelous scene in which he suddenly complains that the room is getting dark even though it isn’t. He turns on the light switch, but still complains the room is getting darker. Then he collapses to the floor and dies, and Letty carefully removes all her possessions from his body in a long, silent scene that represents Joan Crawford’s finest acting in the film and was what probably evoked Film Fan Monthly’s authors to compare this to Tosca. Unfortunately, Letty’s and Jerry’s idyll at Jerry’s parents’ palatial mansion in upstate New York is interrupted abruptly by Hennessey (William Pawley), a New York City police detective who shows up and insists that Letty must accompany him immediately to be interrogated over Emile’s suspicious death. Jerry insists on coming with her to support her psychologically, and he, Letty, and Letty’s mother (May Robson, who frankly turns in the most authoritative and believable performance in the film) face district attorney Haney (Lewis Stone, presumably on the last rung of his legal career before he gets appointed as a judge in the Hardy Family series, also at MGM). Haney presents the evidence that seems to implicate Letty in Emile’s murder, including the bill for the customs duties he paid for her; the packet of love letters which she inexplicably didn’t take with her when she killed Emile; and a shoe she left behind. (One would think a woman who so meticulously removed her handbag from the dead man’s grasp would notice that she’d lost one of her shoes. The film would have made more sense if the writers, Wanda Tuchock and John Meehan, had reversed the items so she’d left with both shoes but left the handbag behind.) Jerry decides to get Letty off the hook for Emile’s murder by insisting, in a plot twist no major-studio writer would have dared dream up after enforcement of the Production Code tightened in 1934, that while Emile was killed he and Letty were at his place having sex. Mrs. Lynton backs up the story, and Letty is set free for a murder she almost certainly committed – though a savvier director than Clarence Brown might have made it ambiguous by inserting a shot in which Letty tries to dissuade Emile from drinking the poisoned wine but Emile drinks it anyway.

Letty Lynton was kept out of circulation by MGM for 95 years because rather than obey the court dictate that they give Edward Shelton and Margaret Ayer Barnes one-fifth of the film’s income, they just shelved it, though at least sometime in the 1950’s someone in MGM’s vault staff transferred it from nitrate to safety stock, so it was preserved instead of rotting away in the vaults. In 2025 the play Dishonored Lady, from which the plot of Letty Lynton had allegedly been plagiarized, entered the public domain; and rather than risk having Letty Lynton itself enter the public domain in 2027 George Feltenstein of Warner Home Video and Casey LaLonde, Joan Crawford’s grandson, worked to have the film restored, re-copyrighted, and issued on home video at last. After all the wait it would be nice to be able to report that Letty Lynton is a rediscovered masterpiece, but it isn’t. It’s an uneven film with moments of greatness. There are a surprising number of overhead shots and unusual camera angles for a film directed by someone as ordinarily vanilla as Clarence Brown, but also some appallingly obvious process shots, especially in the shipboard scenes. One particularly creative aspect I liked is the use of then-popular songs for the underscoring, including “Home (When Shadows Fall),” heard as Letty and Jerry discover their love for each other after a comic-relief scene in which their attempts to find a spot on board the ship to canoodle are continually interrupted by crew members swabbing one deck after another. (And people thought 1969’s Easy Rider was so innovative for using then-popular songs to set the mood of the story.) One thing I found weak about the film was Robert Montgomery’s performance; the role cried out for Cary Grant – who was then just starting on the path to stardom at another studio, Paramount – or, if not him, then Clark Gable, who was under MGM contract and had already been established as a frequent co-star of Crawford’s. Reviewers at the time faulted the sheer unlikelihood of the story; Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times wrote, “Clarence Brown, the director, pays too much attention to his photographic effects and not enough to the necessary psychology of the characters or the plausibility of the incidents. Both the comedy and the drama are forced.”

On balance Letty Lynton is a fascinating curio from Joan Crawford’s career as well as more evidence of how much the movie world lost when the studios were forced by a pressure campaign from the Roman Catholic Church and its front group, the Legion of Decency (that name says it all!) to get serious about enforcing the Production Code in 1934. In its casual treatment of sexual relationships as well as the way Letty Lynton literally gets away with murder, this was a story that would have given major traumas to anyone trying to film it under post-Code auspices – as indeed producer Hunt Stromberg, director Robert Stevenson, and especially screenwriter Edmund H. North went through the tortures of the damned whey they filmed the original Sheldon/Barnes play Dishonored Lady in 1947 and North had to rewrite the script over and over to satisfy the Code enforcers’ demands!