Richie-67-485852 Bette Davis was known at some point to never let her audience down when it came to her movie roles and this movie s that. Powerful in its story-telling and slow to reel you in and then hook, The Letter gets better as it unfolds but not to disappoint those that like to get right to it, this movie also hits the ground running right at the start. Every viewer gains as this movie is played. Good cast and crew to not mention memorable scenes that make one want to see the movie again despite knowing the ending. Excellent character and ethics being acted out and how quick they can all come to risk should the right circumstances prevail. This movie presents those ducks all lined up and ready to quack away. What fascinates us is when a fellow human being bets all they have on a thing, outcome or want. Not one but three people succumb making us see that dark forces if given an inch will take a mile if we blink. We blink and the rest is good entertainment. Ask yourself if this could have happened to you and if so, what would you do? Play the different characters and keep asking. In the end, all we say or do comes down to truth or whatever topples us. In this case, its in writing and peoples life's
joshuanicholls-11150 The letter directed by William Wyler starred Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson. the setting was in Singapore. the letter is a crime drama.the film starts with Leslie Crosbie(Bette Davis) emptying a clip on a man who she claimed assaulted her. The authorities take Leslie to jail until the trial. Howard Joyce(James Stephenson) Leslie's lawyer gets a hold of a letter that says she called for Mr. Hammond to her house saying that her husband was away and that she wanted him to come over. When Leslie is told of this she said that she never wrote that and that it was a fraud. She later its to writing the letter. The filming in this movie has lots of movement unlike other films with set stages. The Letter begins with this aspect from the very beginning. in this specific shot in which the camera is moving left to right and moving up and down giving a broad visual for the set. this continues through out the movie. for example when they enter Chinatown the camera is moving with the car and changing perspective so you can see what the characters see.the acting was very well done. Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson were amazing. The extras and side characters did just as good. Bette Davis over did it. Her acting was fine she was just over dramatic. My overall reaction to the film was an 8/10. i gave it an 8/10 because like i said earlier how Bette Davis was over dramatic. if it wasn't for that i would've given it an 10/10.
Edgar Allan Pooh . . . by an inscrutable Asian upon an unarmed American woman--Bette Davis--in BOTH versions of its climax, it's clear that Warner Bros.' live-action feature THE LETTER is much MORE than merely an adaptation of novelist W. Somerset Maugham's best-seller. Just as Japan broke ALL the rules of warfare with its perfidious destruction of America's Sunday Morning-Worshipping Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor within months of this Warner Bros. Warning (following up THAT outrage with a non-stop Parade of War Crimes including the Bataan Death March), THE LETTER is carefully crafted to shine a spotlight revealing the True Nature of that outlaw island war criminal hangout's Threat to Civilization. Using Singapore as a stand-in for Japan (Warner could hardly film in Tokyo while that Failed Rogue State was Raping Nanking), Bette's garishly Be-Bangled She-Devil Rival for Asia's Scarce Natural Resources first bankrupt's Bette's household through a nasty Blackmail Plot before Back-Stabbing her to death. This sorry conclusion aptly forecasts how a Resource-Envious Japan had its two-faced ambassador "talking peace" in Washington, DC, at the very moment that the Japanese Death Bombs began raining down upon the placid worship services in Hawaii.
MisterWhiplash Boy, do they make em like this anymore?It's interesting that film-noir as a genre or a mood or a "type" of film style and approach to storytelling is credited as beginning one year after The Letter (with the Maltese Falcon) as it seems like William Wyler's adaptation of the Maugham story could be called one of the entry points. Certainly one could think of Bette Davis being a sort of 'femme fatale' here, though probably leaning more to the melodramatic side while still having that deep-down cold and icy side of her. But it's there in the character and, at least in significant chunks, in Wyler's approach to cinematography and mis-en-scene. Hell, the shots through the blinds crafting shadows as (mostly) Davis stands by a window seems like the blueprint for directors to follow (if it wasn't done before, which I'm sure I'm wrong it was).And the opening kicks things off literally with a bang! I don't know of any other way to phrase that (sorry), but it is a moment in movie history that is difficult to forget: after a crane shot that tracks along a sleepy, moon-lit night in Singapore (we're seeing the locals asleep in their mosquito-netted huts) we hear gun-fire, and out from the front door of a home staggers a man who could be dead already but god knows Davis's Leslie Crosby isn't taking any chances. Bang-bang-bang-bang, and every shot shows her fierce and in that Bette Davis way out of control. But without a word she goes back inside, the natives crowding around, and it's only with her back turned to them all that she asks for someone to go fetch her husband to tell what happened (only that Mr. Hammond has been shot, of course).What's also fascinating in The Letter is that Leslie's downfall is all due to becoming too close to the truth, or I should say in telling it and seeing it firsthand. At first, one of the (dark) joys in this performance is that one knows Leslie is acting and that Davis is acting in a double way, as Leslie but also as Leslie's version of herself to the men around her, to her husband and lawyer friend Howard (Stephenson, who plays as well subtle as Davis does big and frightened and totally emotional). And even when this particular letter of the title is unearthed and brought to the attention of the lawyer as a sort of blackmail device (if they so choose of course, nothing stopping them from dooming Leslie and entering it in as evidence to the prosecution), Leslie is *still* lying and putting on an act. I liked that as well.But the most intriguing scene, the one where I felt Wyler's full skill as a director in crafting an eerie but intense mood, is in the middle of the picture when Howard and Leslie go to seek out the late Mrs. Hammond, a woman who seems Asian and talks it but has a face that is not strictly Chinese or other. It's one thing that there has to be a translator, but that's not what makes it eerie. What's gripping is that it's this scene where we see Leslie become much more vulnerable, and part of that is this woman sees her as what she has always been: a picture image of white privilege, on to the arm of her rubber-plantation tycoon husband who is a good-hearted sap for believing his wife is as loving as he is, and that while she can never has what Leslie has, she can most certainly destroy her or to come close to that power to do so at least. The contempt on her face may make some find her to be a villain, but I found her in a strange way oddly sympathetic - she'll always be the mistress with the gold chains around her, and looked on as a "horrible" person (as Leslie previously describes her to Howard). And yet, she is who she says she is.While a few of the Asian types could have been handled a little more delicately and hasn't aged so well, that's not the focus after all. What's so great about The Letter is that Davis and Wyler get us to if not root for Leslie than certainly see her as someone who is heavily, wildly flawed as a human being, a person not being true to her emotions for so long that when she comes to grips with what she's doing (also via her lawyer), she explodes in front of her husband. It's a story of a woman doing a man wrong, but she's also doing herself wrong, too, and that's part of the melodrama/tragedy of it. Where the "Noir" part of it comes with human nature becoming so twisted that it turns into something else - we're seeing into darker recesses of the soul, also cinematically speaking, but it's done fairly realistically (at least as far as these stories go, and the ending, while fitting, is there certainly to appeal to the Code). Davis brings it as an actor going along this carefully constructed arc and finds every right note to play as a woman driven by her ions, though she's not *as* cold and calculating as femme fatales were to come; this is almost like the warm-up act, but what a warm-up! And what an opening!
