The Letter
D: William Wyler (1940); with Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Gale Sondergaard, Frieda Inescort. Bette is at her finest as Leslie Crosbie in this Somerset Maugham story. She is drop-dead stylish in an Orry-Kelly gown as she guns down the overseer of the rubber plantation that her husband (Marshall) owns. She elicits much sympathy with the tale that she was subjected to crude advances from the overseer, and her acquittal on the charges of murder is imminent. No one has any reason to suspect anything else, except the overseer’s wife, a stereotypical Chinese Dragon Lady, played by the begowned and bejeweled Sondergaard. The highly underrated Miss Sondergaard, originally cast as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, would eventually lose her Hollywood career with the McCarthy witch hunt of the Fifties, and she has little to do in this movie except look inscrutable and flare her nostrils. But Bette has plenty to do, working every inch of the set as she finds out that Dragon Lady has a letter written to the overseer from none other than Leslie Crosbie, begging him to come and see her the night of the murder when her husband was out of town. That letter is offered to Mrs. Crosbie’s attorney, urbanely played by Stephenson, who is aghast at its implications, but purchases it on behalf of his client for $10,000. Now guilty of withholding evidence, he does only what is necessary to keep his client from hanging. Crosbie’s husband knows little about any of this, and truly believes his wife killed the man in self-defense, until the purchase of the letter eventually forces the truth to come out. Mrs. Crosbie was in love with the overseer, and they had been having an affair for years. She had been unaware until very recently, however, that the overseer had Dragon Lady for a wife, and Dragon Lady wasn’t so eager to see the whole mess swept under the rug. When it appears that Mrs. Crosbie will get off as scot-free as OJ Simpson, Dragon Lady goes into action. All’s ill that ends ill.This article appears in December 24 • 1999.