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SPOILER ALERT!
You know that opening scene in The Letter, that movie made in 1940, where some man comes stumbling out onto the veranda of a bungalow after a shot has been fired, with Bette Davis coming right behind him, pumping him full of lead until she hears the click on a spent cartridge? It turns out that this movie, and that scene in particular, was ultimately based on a true story in which Ethel Proudlock did pretty much the same thing to her lover in 1911.
W. Somerset Maugham was inspired by her case to write a short story based on it in 1926, which became the basis for a play, several movies, many of which are in a foreign language, television productions, a musical, and finally an opera. I guess you could say that there is something about the story that captures the imagination.
Anyway, as for that 1940 version, the shooting takes place on a rubber plantation near Singapore. Bette Davis plays Leslie Crosbie, and the man she kills is Geoffrey Hammond. As she stands over his body, the moon appears from behind a cloud, causing her to look up as it shines a light on her guilt.
The men who work the plantation, referred to as boys, sleep outside the house. They are awakened by the shooting. She tells the head boy to send someone for John Withers, the new district officer, and then send another boy for her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall). When word reaches Robert, he tells a subordinate to call Howard Joyce, who is a lawyer, and who, along with his wife Dorothy, is a friend of the Crosbies.
When Robert gets home, Leslie says of Hammond, “He tried to make love to me, and I shot him.” In the short story, she says, “He tried to rape me, and I shot him.” However, one of the “Be Carefuls” of the Production Code was the subject of rape, so I guess not using the word “rape” was one way of being careful. It sounds funny though.
With Robert, Joyce, and Withers all having arrived, she tells her story. She tells how she got a surprise visit from Geoffrey Hammond, whom she and Robert had not seen for three months. After some conversation, he professed his love for her, and when she rebuffed him, he became physically aggressive. He picked her up and started carrying her when he stumbled on some steps (the ones leading to the bedroom). She says she got loose, grabbed a revolver, and shot him.
The fact that Joyce, who is her lawyer now, did not insist on speaking to her alone and not in the presence of Withers, an officer of the law, is an indication of just how much he and the others all assume her innocence. However, Joyce does become a little skeptical, unlike Withers, who completely accepts her story, as does Robert. Though she will have to be tried for murder, yet an acquittal seems to be a foregone conclusion.
Joyce has a Chinese law clerk, Ong Chi Seng, whose polite manner is an obvious pose, beneath which he conceals his devious methods, instantiating the cliché of the Asian that is able to turn his Western education against the very white people that provided him with it. He brings to Joyce’s attention the existence of a letter that makes it obvious that Geoffrey and Leslie were lovers, and in which she begged Geoffrey to visit her the night she killed him. The letter is in the possession of Hammond’s widow (Gale Sondergaard in yellowface), who is Eurasian.
In the short story, she is referred to simply as the Chinese woman Hammond was living with. To conform to the Production Code, it was probably thought better to have them be married, and even though the prohibition against miscegenation applied explicitly to sex between black and white, misgivings about sex between yellow and white might have led those who produced this movie to ameliorate the situation by having her be at least half-white.
Leslie has to pay $10,000 to get the letter back. (This is the same sum as in the short story, published in 1926. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $175,000 today.) In addition to that, Mrs. Hammond insists that Leslie bring her the money in person. The point is to humiliate her. (In the short story, the Chinese woman makes no such demand, and she shows no interest in exacting revenge on Leslie in any form. All she wants is the money.)
Joyce has to tell Robert a little about the letter, without revealing just how incriminating it is and without revealing just how much it will cost, saying simply that it would be best to buy the letter. Thinking the sum could not be that great, Robert gives his permission for Joyce to buy the letter.
Guided by Ong, Joyce and Leslie go to meet Mrs. Hammond in the Chinese section of Singapore. When they arrive at a shop, the owner shows Joyce and Leslie some items he has for sale, including a wicked-looking dagger. Along the principle of Chekhov’s gun, we have an ominous feeling that this dagger will be used before this movie is over. They are then led into a room where a man is smoking an opium pipe, so much so that the smoke fills the room, and they have to ask for a window to be opened. When Mrs. Hammond enters the room, we see the hate in her eyes. After Ong has received the money on her behalf, she demands that Leslie come to her. Mrs. Hammond throws the letter on the floor, and Leslie has to bow down to pick it up.
Joyce has had his own problems with this business. He knows it is unethical, even illegal, to suppress evidence in this way. During the summation at her trial, his guilt bothers him so much that for a moment he cannot go on. But he steels himself and continues to argue that Mrs. Crosbie only did what any honorable woman would have done in her place, had she the strength and courage to do so. After he is finished, we see that he is miserable.
After Leslie is acquitted, a party is held at the Joyce residence to celebrate. When there is a moment when Joyce, Robert, and Leslie are alone, Robert is full of excitement about his plan to buy his own rubber plantation in Sumatra. It is then that Joyce has to remind him of the letter he had to pay for and how much it cost. Shocked by the amount, Robert demands to see that letter. Joyce hesitates, but a resigned Leslie tells him to give Robert the letter. Then Leslie reveals what really happened that night, how Hammond told her he wanted to end their affair, and in anger she killed him.
Later that evening, Robert wants to forgive her, saying, “If you love a person, you can forgive anything,” apparently forgetting that Leslie’s murder of Hammond contradicts that. At first, she tries to fake it, but repulsed by her own lie, she tells him she does not and cannot love him, saying, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed.”
As noted above, the Chinese woman in the short story cared only about the money. Joyce was going to bring it to her himself, but when Robert found out how much money was involved, he insisted on coming along. (This makes more sense. It is a weak point in the movie that Robert does not ask how much the letter will cost.) When Robert gets his hands on the letter and reads it, he realizes Leslie had been having an affair and that she murdered Hammond. As the story ends, we gather that he and Leslie will be stuck with each other in a loveless marriage.
That would not have been sufficient punishment for Leslie under the Production Code, especially since her innocent husband suffers just as much as she does. Therefore, she must die. Mrs. Hammond is a continual, malevolent presence throughout the movie. Leslie realizes that her nemesis is waiting for her, and as another full moon shines down on her, she voluntarily steps outside the house for her punishment, which she receives when Mrs. Hammond stabs her with the dagger earlier seen.
Although the Production Code was gone by the time the 1982 version was made with Lee Remick as Leslie, this ending, at least in implication, was kept. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a television movie that led the producers to decide that Leslie still needed to die as punishment for what she did. A significant difference, however, has to do with the use of flashbacks. The 1982 version of The Letter allows Leslie’s story about how Hammond supposedly tried to rape her to be visualized even though it is a lie. For this purpose, Ian McShane, a well-known actor, plays Hammond. In the 1940 version, the role of Hammond is only a bit part, played by a relatively unknown actor, for all he does is get shot by Leslie at the beginning of the movie. In fact, there are a total of three visualized flashbacks in the 1982 version, with only the last one being veridical, when Leslie defiantly tells Robert what really happened. This was the first version I saw, by the way, which I enjoyed so much that I watched the 1940 version at my first opportunity.
A Pre-Code version of this story was made in 1929, starring Jeanne Eagles as Leslie. The 1929 and 1940 versions illustrate an interesting fact about Herbert Marshall. He played Leslie’s husband Robert in the 1940 version, but played Geoffrey Hammond, her lover, in the 1929 version. In general, Marshall seems to do all right sexually when he is a bachelor, such as in Trouble in Paradise (1932), but as a husband, he is usually an unloved, sad sack, such as in Blonde Venus (1932), but especially in The Little Foxes (1941), where he has the misfortune of being Bette Davis’s husband again.
The 1929 version starts off slowly with an establishment shot of some harbor in Singapore. The next shot is in the city, where lowlifes seek their seedy forms of entertainment, and finally we are brought onto the rubber plantation and into the Crosbie house, where Robert is telling Leslie, who is working on a piece of lace, that he is going into Singapore. She asks him not to be long. He tells her how much he appreciates her. “Only wives like you can make these godforsaken places bearable. Seven years on a rubber plantation, with no company but natives and a lot of dowdy planters’ wives.”
“Yes, Robert,” she replies, “That ought to be the test for a good wife.”
The slow pace of this opening scene gives us a sense of the boredom that Leslie experiences day after day. It is easy to sympathize with her having an affair, and with the anger she feels later on when Geoffrey tries to break off their relationship, for then she would have absolutely nothing. This 1929 version gets points for helping us understand Leslie’s desperate situation.
Leslie’s boring life was only more or less implied in the 1940 version, but the 1982 movie emphasizes it, with Leslie becoming furious when Robert tells her of his plans for their future life after she is acquitted, which will practically be just the two of them, together forever.
Anyway, returning to the 1929 version, it is after Robert leaves that she writes the letter to Geoffrey.
The scene changes to where we see Geoffrey lying supine on a couch, reading a section of Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in particular the part that begins, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” He is reading it to Li Ti, who affectionately rests her body on him. It is clear that she adores him, while we suspect that for him, she is merely another mistress, of whom he will one day tire, much as he is starting to tire of Leslie. As noted above, Herbert Marshall does all right with women as long as he’s not married to them.
Geoffrey goes to see Leslie, and she tells him how unhappy she is with him, that he is neglecting her. “Don’t you know how I love you?” she asks.
“Well, darling,” he replies, “you have a damn funny way of showing it.” I guess he didn’t learn a thing from that poem he was reading.
In any event, he tells her that the time has come for their affair to be ended, that he doesn’t love her, and that she means nothing to him. When she threatens to kill herself, he says, “Go ahead.” She goes for her gun, but not to commit suicide.
After she is arrested, it comes to her lawyer’s attention that Li Ti has the letter Leslie sent to Geoffrey, and she wants $10,000 for it. And Leslie has to bring the money herself. When she arrives, Li Ti pulls open a curtain and reveals five women behind the bamboo bars of a cage, where they are being held as sex slaves. A Chinese man comes in and looks over the women lasciviously, but none suit his fancy. However, he does show an interest in Leslie, making her uncomfortable.
After Li Ti receives the money, she throws the letter on the floor. When Leslie bends down to retrieve it, the women in the cage start laughing and pointing at her. Though their lives are miserable, yet they are vouchsafed this brief moment of happiness in seeing a white woman bow down before a yellow woman. Well, half-yellow. She is referred to as half-caste, even though she is played by Lady Tsen Mei, a Chinese actress. The purpose of this scene is to show us how degenerate the yellow race is, for this version is the most racist of them all in its depiction of Asians, which is not surprising for a Pre-Code movie.
After Leslie testifies in her own defense against a charge of murder, Robert assures her she will be acquitted. She says she wants to go to London, and he agrees, but only as a two-week vacation. After that, he says he wants to buy a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Leslie’s face falls. She will be doomed to even more boredom living there than ever before.
In this movie, Leslie is unpunished and unrepentant, defiantly telling her husband that she does not love him and still loves the man she killed. And that is it. She does not have to die in the end.