Third time ‘round for Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER (an Early Talkie with gifted/doomed Jeanne Eagels in 1929 then haute Golden Age Hollywood from William Wyler for Bette Davis in 1940*) updates the property and moves from corrupt exotic Singapore to upperclass Wilshire Boulevard, L.A. Now, Ann Sheridan’s the unfaithful wife who kills her attacker (or is it her lover?), Zachary Scott the blinkered husband and Lew Ayres the lawyer who’s also a family friend. (Herbert Marshall played them both: lawyer in ‘29; cuckold in ‘40.) It works, too, but there’s a structural problem since we’ve left Maugham’s unrepentant ways behind and need to thread a needle of love & redemption. It means a whole extra act & epilogue (it feels less like a fourth act than like a second third act), and director Vincent Sherman, elsewise near his best, loses his footing in the last two reels. Still awfully good. Sheridan, Scott & Ayres habitually underrated actors, and substitutions for the other characters particularly clever (Steven Geray, Jerome Cowan, John Hoyt, Marta Mitrovich), plus Eve Arden cracking wise. Look fast to spot the famous atrium & exposed elevators of the Bradbury Office Building in one of its first (of 100) screen appearances. Too bad Warner's official release hasn’t a better print source. It’s watchable, but does Ernest Haller’s lensing no favors.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Wyler/Davis rightly esteemed (it’s the one that opens as Davis shoots her lover six times on the porch), but Jeanne Eagels, cosseted with a nearly abstract visual approach (it’s easily located online in reasonable prints), is something else again. Eagels some kind of acting genius, dead within the year from drug addiction. She didn’t play the role on stage (Katharine Cornell did), but she’s unmatchable, one of the few addicts who seemed to use their addiction as a dramatic tool rather than try to hide behind it. Like a great operatic diva using rather than obscuring vocal flaws for dramatic potential.
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