William Wyler's "The Letter" (1940) - Starting with a Bang

 

Of director William Wyler, Bette Davis once declared, “It was he who helped me realize my full potential as an actress.” Of the actress, Wyler would recall, “She was a director’s dream.” Together they made three very popular and critically acclaimed Hollywood films. The pair first collaborated on the 1938 Warner Bros. production of Jezebel. For her performance Bette Davis won the second of her two Best Actress Academy Awards. Davis was sorely disappointed that Wyler had not received a Best Director nod for his work on the film and would later credit her Oscar-winning portrayal to him, “It was all Wyler,” she wrote.

Bette Davis and William Wyler

In January 1940, Warner Bros. announced that Bette Davis would star in a remake of a film adapted from a play Somerset Maugham had dramatized from his own short story, The Letter. In April, Wyler was hired to direct, on loan from Samuel Goldwyn who would, in turn, be able to use Davis for his upcoming The Little Foxes, which would be the last film Wyler and Davis would make together. In an interview years later, Wyler recalled that he had read Howard Koch’s script for The Letter and liked it and that he wanted to work with Davis again. His only regret was that cinematographer Gregg Toland was unavailable. For her part, Davis was eager to work with Wyler on another very promising project; Maugham’s sensational tale of British colonial “white mischief” was set in the exotic Far East and replete with adultery, deceit and murder.

The Malay Peninsula

By the time he traveled to British Malaya in 1921, Somerset Maugham was a well established writer of best-selling fiction and popular stage plays. While in the colonies he met an attorney, Courtenay Dickinson, who told him of a scandalous case he’d handled ten years earlier. In 1911, Dickinson represented the wife of the headmaster at a boys’ school in Kuala Lumpur who shot and killed a male friend one night while her husband was out. The headmaster was William J. Proudlock, a British citizen, and his school was the prestigious Victorian Institute, founded in the capital city in 1894. Proudlock’s wife, Ethel, had been visited by William Crozier Stewart, an engineering consultant, while her husband was at dinner with an associate one night in April 1911. Though Mrs. Proudlock claimed that Stewart had attempted rape and that she shot him (several times) in self-defense, she was found guilty at trial and sentenced to death. The outcry of the local British community prevailed, however, and Ethel Proudlock was freed after serving a scant five months in prison. Maugham developed a fictionalized account of the case, with details changed and flourishes added; Maugham said of himself, “I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller.” The Letter first appeared in a collection of his short stories in 1924.

Somerset Maugham’s stage adaptation of The Letter debuted in London in 1927, starring Gladys Cooper as rubber plantation wife Leslie Crosbie and Nigel Bruce as plantation manager Robert Crosbie. The play premiered on Broadway later that year starring Katharine Cornell. In 1929, illustrious American actress Jeanne Eagels played the lead in a Paramount film directed by Jean de Limur; her co-stars included Reginald Owen as Crosbie and Herbert Marshall as shooting victim Geoffrey Hammond. Eagels received a posthumous Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance.

Jeanne Eagels and Reginald Owen, The Letter (1929)

Somerset Maugham’s short story opens in Singapore within the offices of Howard Joyce, the attorney representing Leslie Crosbie, who is charged with murder. Joyce’s clerk, Ong, ushers in Robert Crosbie, husband of the accused. The lawyer expresses concern that Crosbie is not bearing up well under the strain of his wife’s arrest and incarceration. Maugham re-engineered the opening for dramatic effect when he adapted it for the stage. As the curtain rises, the sound of a pistol shot is heard. A man (Hammond) staggers across a sitting-room toward its veranda and cries “Oh, my God!” A woman (Crosbie) follows, firing her gun into him even after he has fallen.

Howard Koch’s script for William Wyler’s film opened with an exterior shot of the Crosbie bungalow, the sound of a sudden gunshot followed by a woman stalking a man as he flees, her revolver blazing. Reading this scenario for the first time, Wyler thought it was literally “starting with a bang” and decided the scene should be set up “…with an opposite mood. A mood of silence, quiet, people sleeping…” Wyler also wanted to evoke “…a feeling of the dank, humid jungle atmosphere of rubber plantation country” and opened the film with an uncut and wordless 2-minute sequence:

Under a vivid full moon and cloud-cluttered night sky, the camera sweeps through a rubber plantation where a tree oozes latex into a collection pot as Malay workers lounge or sleep in hammocks and a white Cockatoo perches on a fence. A gunshot shatters the quiet and the startled bird takes flight. A man emerges onto the veranda of a lamp-lit bungalow and lurches down its steps. Close on his heels strides a woman with a gun, her face a study in fierce resolve. She fires shot after shot into his body until he is a crumpled heap at the foot of the steps. The moon goes dark behind a drift of clouds as Max Steiner’s ominous and hypnotic theme surges.

Wyler reflected,“…it was a more effective opening this way, by having this silence,” and Howard Koch, who fondly remembered working on The Letter, remarked on Wyler’s fine-tuned “instinct for staging.” The opening sequence of The Letter, which took a full day to shoot, establishes not only the film’s noirish mood and hot-house atmosphere, but also the controlled ferocity central to Leslie Crosbie’s character. From this spectacular beginning The Letter unfolds slowly and deliberately, revealing and suggesting its secrets with painstaking care. The film evolves with unrelenting tension and suspense and is remarkable for its expressive camera work and atmospheric effects…

The image of the full moon, breaking through heavy clouds or peering down between the fan-like leaves of palm trees recurs and has been much discussed over the years. According to Wyler, the image of the moon was his attempt “to bring in something mysterious and supernatural” to the story. He knew that this repeated image would lend itself to many interpretations, but his own desire was to add “…a bit of supernaturalism, which I thought belonged.” Another of Wyler’s noteworthy atmospheric accents is the occasional sound of tinkling wind chimes. According to Wyler this was not a planned effect, but something he came up with during filming. There happened to be decorative Chinese wind chimes on the set and when the soundman began to complain that the tinkling annoyed him, the director considered the possibilities and decided they could be used to interesting effect. He thought the chimes made “…an eerie kind of noise, which would heighten the suspense.”

James Stephenson reads "the letter"

At the time The Letter was released, Wyler had recently commented that he believed the sole responsibility for the quality of any film rested entirely with its director. He felt that the director, whose every decision culminated in what ultimately appeared onscreen, was accountable for everything including the performances of the players. The Letter is marked by high caliber acting all around and two impeccable portrayals in particular. Bette Davis is luminous yet coolly controlled as the emotionally repressed Leslie Crosbie, a woman capable of coy charm, relentless guile and calculating deceit - as well as violent rage. James Stephenson, in a breakthrough performance as Howard Joyce, Leslie’s attorney, depicts an intelligent, inherently civilized man manipulated into a wretched compromise. His Howard Joyce, suspicious of the case from the start, endures a visibly wrenching struggle with his own conscience as he becomes ever more entangled in the moral intricacies of Leslie’s defense. The scenes between Bette Davis and James Stephenson are some of the richest moments in the film.

On one important point Wyler and Davis disagreed and that was how the actress should deliver her crucial line at the film’s climax. In the scene, Leslie and Robert Crosbie (Herbert Marshall) are alone together in a darkened room, their marriage in tatters. When Robert asks Leslie if she loves him, she at first says yes, then cracks and cries out, “….with all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” Wyler wanted Davis to look Herbert Marshall directly in the eye as she said these words, but Davis disagreed, she felt no woman could do that, it was too brutal, she would avert her eyes. The two fought and could not agree. Finally, and for the first time in her career, Bette Davis walked off the set. She soon returned and later recalled, “I came back eventually – end result, I did it his way. It played validly, heaven knows, but to this day I think my way was the right way.” She also remarked, “I lost, but I lost to an artist.” 37 years later, Davis was honored as the fifth recipient, and the first woman, to be given the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute (William Wyler had received the award the previous year). In her 1987 memoir This ’n That, she remembered that the high point of the evening, for her, was when Wyler spoke. He said, “If tonight I brought up the subject of [that] scene in The Letter, Bette would insist on going back to Warner Brothers and reshooting it the way she wanted it.” According to Bette,  “Willie’s speech was short and funny and had the added advantage of being true.”

One battle Wyler did not win was with the Production Code. He had made a change to Maugham's ending. The author's and de Limur’s versions end with Leslie's realization that her punishment for her crime will be to live out her years in a country she despises with a man for whom she feels no passion. The closing line is her confession that even now she loves the man she shot. Wyler and Koch devised a more dramatic demise for Mrs. Crosbie, she would die by the dagger of Hammond’s widow. Wyler’s plan was that, “The thing should end with [Gale Sondergaard] killing Bette Davis.” But at the time “nobody could get away with killing somebody, so for censorship reasons we had to tack on the scene of her being arrested.” Wyler could never accept this “silly anticlimactic” ending and complained to the end of his days that the scene of Sondergaard's arrest still ought to be cut from his picture.

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The Letter was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture (Warner Bros.), Best Director (Wyler), Best Actress (Davis), Best Supporting Actor (James Stephenson, who died suddenly in 1941), Best Music, Original Score (Max Steiner), Best Cinematography, Black and White (Tony Gaudio) and Best Film Editing (Warren Low).

Sources:
A Talent for Trouble, Jan Herman, Putnam (1995)
William Wyler - The Authorized Biography, Axel Madsen, Thomas Y. Crowell Co. (1973)
Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, Ed Sikov, Henry Holt (2007)
"Imagery and Sound in William Wyler's The Letter," interview by Charles Higham, Columbia University Oral Research Office (1972)
The Letter: A Play in Three Acts, W. Somerset Maugham, George H. Duran Co. (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday (1934)