The Letter (1940)

November 22, 1940 (New York City), release date

Directed by William Wyler

Screenplay by Howard E. Koch

Based on the 1927 play The Letter by W. Somerset Maugham

Music by Max Steiner

Edited by George Amy, Warren Low

Cinematography by Tony Gaudio

Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie

Herbert Marshall as Robert Crosbie

James Stephenson as Howard Joyce

Frieda Inescort as Dorothy Joyce

Gale Sondergaard as Mrs. Hammond

Bruce Lester as John Withers

Elizabeth Earl as Adele Ainsworth

Cecil Kellaway as Prescott

Sen Yung as Ong Chi Seng

Doris Lloyd as Mrs. Cooper

Willie Fung as Chung Hi

Tetsu Komai as the Crosbies’ “head boy”

Distributed by Warner Bros.

 The Letter was released a week after I Wake up Screaming in 1940, but I find it much easier to think of the latter film as a film noir. I’m not a big fan of categories, and so I am quite happy to think of The Letter as belonging in both categories: avant noir and film noir. In some ways, it is pure melodrama. Bette Davis, as Leslie, emotes in a big way in some scenes, but she is a femme fatale; her husband is the one who is blinded by his love.

(This blog post about The Letter contains spoilers.)

The film opens with Leslie shooting a man on the steps leading from the verandah of her plantation home in Singapore. From that point onward, viewers witness her scheming and her willingness to continue breaking the law. In fact, Leslie’s character is clear to the Singaporean people who work for her and to viewers, but everyone else either believes she is above reproach or is cowed by her strong will. She is a liar, a cheat, and a murderer, and she shows no remorse for all that she has done and the heartache that she has caused. She will do anything to avoid going to prison for her crime, even if it means giving in to Mrs. Hammond’s blackmail scheme and using her lawyer, Howard Joyce, to help her. She doesn’t care about the consequences for anyone, including her lawyer, and the damage to her reputation.

The following exchange between Leslie and her lawyer reveals her true character:

• Leslie Crosbie: “You could get the letter.” [written by Leslie Crosbie and addressed to the murder victim, Mr. Hammond]

• Howard Joyce: “Do you think it’s so easy to do away with unwelcome evidence?”

• Leslie Crosbie: “Surely nothing would have been said to you if . . . if the owner weren’t quite prepared to sell it.”

• Howard Joyce: “That’s true. But I’m not prepared to buy it.”

• Leslie Crosbie: “It wouldn’t be your money. Robert has save—”

• Howard Joyce: “I wasn’t thinking of the money. I don’t know if you understand this, but I’ve always looked upon myself as an honest man. You’re asking me to do something which is not better than suborning a witness.”

Leslie’s lawyer refuses at first to go along with this scheme, but he changes his mind to help his friend Robert Crosbie, Leslie’s husband. Howard Joyce cares more about Robert’s well-being than his wife Leslie does.

Bette Davis gives a fantastic performance as Leslie Crosbie. It’s hard to believe, but I think even she is upstaged anytime Mrs. Hammond (played by Gale Sondergaard) is on-screen. Mrs. Hammond never utters a word of dialogue in The Letter, but her commanding screen presence and her facial expressions explain everything. When Mrs. Hammond sells the letter to Leslie and her lawyer, Howard Joyce, she throws it on the floor and forces Leslie to pick it up. And Leslie does pick it up. And says thank you, too!

The moon is an interesting motif woven throughout the story. It is lovely, of course, but it seemed to represent so many things. In the opening clip, it almost seems to remind Leslie Crosbie of her guilt at what she had just done in shooting Hammond. Later in the movie, it reminds her of her love and—again—what she has done to Hammond. Near the end of the film, she walks out into the moonlight, which seems to pull her with its gravitational force to meet her fate at the hands of Mrs. Hammond.

The sequence at the end of the film with the knife and the moonlight demonstrates Mrs. Hammond’s will once again. Leslie finds the knife on the terrace outside her bedroom door, and she recognizes it as a knife that she had admired in the shop in the China section just before buying the letter from Mrs. Hammond. To underscore the threat, the knife is taken away by the time that Leslie looks for it a second time. Mrs. Hammond and the moonlight cannot be denied: Leslie walks out into the moonlight, even though she seems well aware of what is in store for her.

I was really struck by the colonial way of life portrayed in The Letter, but all that gets turned on its head before the film is over. The plantation workers seem to know more about what’s going on than anyone else in the film. Howard Joyce’s legal assistant Ong Chi Seng is the one who brokers the deal about the letter in the first place. Are viewers supposed to believe that the people of Singapore can’t be trusted and will turn on the plantation owners? Are the plantation workers becoming accustomed to the owners’ habits and customs and use them against the owners to their own advantage? It’s hard to know what the filmmakers and 1940 audiences (now seventy-six years ago) would have felt about the plot details.

There’s no doubt that Leslie Crosbie and Mrs. Hammond are strong-willed women and both are the real stars of The Letter. For me, the real dilemma is how to categorize this film. I think I’m going to stick with my original idea: It’s both an avant noir and a film noir, with maybe a stronger emphasis on the first category. Whatever viewers decide, it’s a great film with two strong female leads who can match each other in their performances.

Lantana (2001)

July 8, 2001, release date (Sydney Film Festival)

Directed by Ray Lawrence

Screenplay by Andrew Bovell

Based on Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell

Music by Paul Kelly

Edited by Karl Sodersten

Cinematography by Mandy Walker

Anthony LaPaglia as Leon Zat

Geoffrey Rush as John Knox

Barbara Hershey as Valerie Somers

Kerry Armstrong as Sonja Zat

Rachael Blake as Jane O’May

Vince Colosimo as Nik D’Amato

Russell Dykstra as Neil Toohey

Daniella Farinacci as Paula D’Amato

Peter Phelps as Patrick Phelan

Leah Purcell as Claudia Weis

Glenn Robbins as Pete O’May

Produced by Australian Film Finance Corporation, MBP, New South Wales Film and Television Office, Jan Chapman Films

Distributed by Palace Films

I thought Lantana was wonderful when I saw it in the theater just a little over fifteen years ago, which is long enough for me to have forgotten many of the twists and turns in the plot. I enjoyed watching it on DVD for the second time. Lantana is about betrayal and grief and the effects of both.

The title comes from a plant that is considered an invasive species in Australia. The spread of lantana is aided by the fact that their leaves are poisonous to most animals. I thought it was an appropriate metaphor for the betrayal and grief that are central themes in the film. For some of the characters, betrayal and grief spread and poison their relationships so that they invite even more grief into their lives.

The film opens with a black background, with white then color type. The sounds of insects and birds begin the soundtrack. The type, which introduces the title of the film and the main actors, jumps on the screen, giving the impression of nervousness. Color vegetation comes up through the black background, and the camera pans over it. Then the camera pauses and delves deeper into the brush, and the screen fades to black again. Music starts with a piano chord, and color vegetation comes back into view, but it’s different this time. Almost immediately, the camera “discovers” a bloody foot. It pans over a woman’s dead body, and then moves back to give the whole screen to it.

From that point onward, almost anything can happen in Lantana. The music is eerie and haunting. It emphasizes the unease in the characters and creates it for the viewer. The special feature “The Nature of Lantana” on the DVD mentions that most of the music was created specifically for the film, and it works perfectly to create an uneasy atmosphere. The same feature on the DVD mentions that almost all the lighting is natural; very little of it is artificial light. Both the music and the lighting bring the viewer right into the emotions at the heart of the story.

Everyone’s lives intersect in some way. It sounds like an unusual, maybe even contrived plot device at first, but some of the characters already know each other. It’s the viewer who is a newcomer, and it’s the missing woman, Valerie Somers, who seems to draw everyone into the center of the story. Leon Zat, the detective investigating her disappearance, is feeling numb, and he admits as much later in the film. But he starts to feel doubt, worry, and angst when he realizes how betrayals, which seem small at first, might be affecting his marriage. Some of the characters converse about profound situations; one in particular is the loss of a child to murder. The strain that the death of a child puts on a marriage leads to more grief, which ripples out to affect the characters and the plot of the film.The difficulty in dealing with grief has a direct effect on the plot and some of the characters’ actions.
 

Everyone has secrets in Lantana. The only characters who don’t have secrets seem to be the children, but even one of them lies to keep his family together. And who can blame him? As soon as viewers, including me, ask that kind of question, they become a little bit complicit, too—but not completely because it is almost impossible to predict what the characters will do or where the plot will go. But the film is always true to the characters, and it’s wonderful to follow their stories to their natural and realistic conclusions.

Mission Hill (Book) (2016)

Mission Hill, by Pamela Wechsler

New York: Minotaur Books, 2016

List of main characters:

Abby Endicott, narrator and assistant district attorney for Suffolk County in Massachusetts

Ty Clarke, Endicott’s boyfriend

Kevin Farnsworth, Boston police detective

Max Lombardo, district attorney and Endicott’s boss

Owen Guilfoyle, Max Lombardo’s chief of staff

Carl Ostroff, channel 7 reporter

Orlando Jones, gang member (North Street Posse)

Melvin Jones, Orlando’s father

Dermot Michaels, assistant district attorney for Middlesex County

Joshua (Josh) McNamara, FBI agent

I wanted Mission Hill to give me a story that would keep me coming back. I heard the author interviewed on National Public Radio, and her description of the novel’s opening hooked me right away. Her background writing two of my favorite Law & Order shows sealed it for me. The novel almost met my expectations, and I would recommend it.

An unnamed narrator (Abby Endicott gives her name in the second chapter) opens the novel by describing her nightly ritual of listing all the people that she has prosecuted for murder:

                My list contains twenty-six names. It’s arranged in chronological order and reaches back four years. It used to include victims, the people who fuel my addiction to the job and keep me coming back for more. When my homicides climbed into double digits, there were too many names to remember. Someone had to go, either predator or prey. Reluctantly, I let go of my victims, held on to my killers. I had to. That’s the whole point. They remember me, so I have to remember them. (page 1)

The novel starts right away in noir mode: full of angst, dread, and anxiety. And the unnamed narrator/prosecutor has a legitimate basis for her fears: She’s an assistant district attorney for Suffolk County in Massachusetts, a jurisdiction that includes the city of Boston. She’s prosecuted several criminals who could easily blame her for their incarceration and single her out for revenge. But the next several chapters are mired in laying out the details of the first murder that occurs in the time frame of the novel and introducing numerous characters.

You might think, because of the list of characters that opens this blog, that I must be easily overwhelmed if I couldn’t keep track of ten characters. But that list is the short version. As I got deeper into the story, I decided to write down characters’ names and a brief description of each so I could keep track of everyone—and maybe even guess the identity of the murderer before I finished the novel. After several chapters, I gave up adding to the list, but before I gave up, I had forty-two characters. Many of them were related to one another, which made it more difficult to keep track of them. The experience reminded me of Russian novels that list the characters and their relationships at the front of the book so English readers would know who was who, except that I had to write this list myself.

I also found the organization of the novel to be a bit choppy. With less than 300 pages divided into fifty-three chapters, the narrative was broken, it seemed to me, almost arbitrarily. The reader is rarely invited into the mind and the heart of Abby Endicott, the narrator and main character. I wanted to know more about her feelings and her reasoning when it came to all the events in the story, not just the case that she was charged with prosecuting after the start of the novel. (I sided with her boyfriend Ty Clarke when they argued about how little they divulged to one another.) I wanted to care about her and her circumstances. It wasn’t until Chapter 43 that I began to be truly absorbed by the story. Until that point, I had lots of places, occupations, and plot twists, in addition to people, to track and sort, with little reflection from Endicott on what it all meant to her. I wish the novel had delved into both the characters and the events more slowly or had handled all the details more subtly so that I didn’t notice the number of characters and didn’t feel overwhelmed by all the information.

So why would I recommend Mission Hill after registering these observations?

First, I have a feeling that this novel will be made into a great neo-noir film in the near future. I can already picture Ben Affleck directing it. If you enjoy seeing how a story is transformed from a book into a film, as I do, then reading the book first is obligatory. It’s a good story in print; it’s possible I allowed my expectations to be raised too high, after all.

Second, in spite of my careful notes and reading, I never had a clue about the identity of the murderer. (Notice that I give no spoilers in this blog post.) The element of surprise, especially in noir literature or film noir, is a huge plus. Mission Hill delivers the element of surprise.

And third, I suspect that Wechsler has more Abby Endicott stories to pen. And I hope that’s true because I would like to see what happens next for her and her boyfriend Ty Clarke.

And on a personal note (fourth), I’ll be looking for the murderer again in Endicott’s next case. I hope that I am surprised again.