The Letter

Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a rubber planter in colonial Malaya, stands trial for shooting a man she says forced himself on her. Her account holds together and her defence works, right up until a handwritten letter surfaces. This 1929 version of Somerset Maugham's 1927 play was made in the first months of talking pictures, and Jeanne Eagels carried her stage authority straight to the microphone. She died that October at thirty nine, of causes the coroners never agreed on, which made her Best Actress nomination the first one ever given to a performer after death. Shot before the Production Code, it also ends without the punishment the famous 1940 remake was obliged to add.