The Letter

On a rubber plantation in Malaya, Leslie Crosbie shoots a man. Her account is clear: he attacked her and she defended herself. Then a letter surfaces. William Wyler directed, from Somerset Maugham's play. Bette Davis plays Leslie. The letter shows that she summoned the man she killed, her former lover Geoffrey Hammond, that night. Her lawyer finds it in the possession of Hammond's widow and has to pay an enormous sum to suppress it. The killing at the end was added because of the Hays Code. The Production Code Administration had rejected the original adaptation for showing murder and adultery going unpunished, and so Hammond's widow takes her revenge on Leslie in the final scene. Wyler and Davis clashed hard over one scene. In the moment where Leslie admits she still loves the man she killed, Davis argued the character could not hold eye contact; Wyler disagreed and Davis walked off the set. The film took seven Academy Award nominations and won none. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 100 percent. James Stephenson, as the lawyer Howard Joyce, took both an Oscar nomination and a National Board of Review award; Wyler had cast him over the studio's objections. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hollywood melodrama and want to watch Davis. Who it is not for: anyone unable to set aside how the film builds its colonial world. The local characters are used as scenery throughout.