The Letter

Black and white, 35 mm
USA, 1940, 95 min
Section: Tribute to William Wyler

Synopsis

“After Jezebel, I would have jumped into the Hudson River if he had told me to. That’s how much belief I had in his judgment as a director,” declared Bette Davis after first working with William Wyler. The opportunity to make another film together, this time based on a play by William Somerset Maugham, came in 1940. A cold and calculating woman, the wife of a rubber tree plantation owner, who murders her secret lover in a rush of injured pride, tries to escape the consequences of her crime by deliberately relying on colonial-world conventions. Her attempt at impunity, however, is jeopardised by a single piece of compromising evidence – a letter to the victim. Using a crime-plot blueprint, Wyler gives play to themes that society had not yet opened up to: adultery, the hidden emotional life of a married woman, domination and subordination in relationships, the position of women in a male society, inner temperament hidden behind a facade of conventionality and snobbery, and the racial hypocrisy of colonial society. Not even in the case of this film, however, did the director avoid censorship: as opposed to the literary original, where the heroine’s punishment is “merely” her mental anguish, the cinematic version had to make a clearer formulation. In addition to its popularity among moviegoers, the film also received seven Oscar nominations and was made famous by one scene in particular. Wyler was able to get such a rarity out of the opening, very suggestive, scene, in which the murder plays out amid an impeccable setting, atmosphere, and plot line in which the protagonist’s character is precisely defined.