The Letter
Warner Home Video DVD
Accepted for many years as a classic Hollywood woman's picture, The Letter can finally be recognized as a great, fully realized, melodramatic examination of colonialism. The dramatic event is sexual corruption and murder. Bette Davis plays the wife of a rubber-plantation owner in Singapore who begins the film killing her lover. What follows seems prescient in the Court TV age. The British imperialist system conspires to exculpate the white woman of her crimes. But director William Wyler stages the murder trickily: After Davis' gun clicks empty, she looks up. The moon lights up her madness. Nature, fate, justice follow.
Shot in b&w, The Letter predates film noir, but Wyler and cinematographer Tony Gaudio seem to know it's coming. Visually the movie is conceived in moral contrasts: striped upholstery, Venetian blinds, constant shadows, checkboard tiles. Instead of suspense, the movie hangs morality in the balance. Not really a courtroom drama, the storyline follows Davis' deception and how it interrupts Western industry. It also shows the colonists' and the natives' senses of themselves.
The Letter essentially deals with a subject Americans had no word for in 1940-racism. (The precise term would not enter global consciousness until after the Holocaust.) But Kipling, Forster, Conrad and John O'Hara had already outlined the cultural institutions that abet racism; The Letter might be the first Hollywood movie to critique it, albeit unconsciously.
When Davis meets the wife of the man she killed, she turns out to be a towering, terrifying "Eurasian" woman (Gale Sondergaard) who speaks only Chinese and Malay. Strangely, the absent character is the dead man, the miscegenator. Mixing is the fear that lay at the heart of this W. Somerset Maugham story; fear that the West will betray itself then lay open to the wrath of the Orient.
Davis was in the midst of her phenomenal streak as the preeminent American movie melodramatic star. (The Letter comes between Jezebel, Dark Victory and The Little Foxes and Now Voyager-all memorable.) No other Hollywood actress made such a compelling pendulum swing between good and evil. When Davis is arrested and struts through the prison, her arrogance is audacious-sexual, nationalistic, profane, irresistible. This expose of cultural myth and sexual hypocrisy is really John Ford or Josef von Sternberg material. Coming from Wyler, it's weird yet perfectionist: down to Davis' symbolic nervous habit of knitting a tangled web of deception.