TAKE A LETTER

I see that fellow ArtsJournal blogger Terry Teachout "watched the first part of 'The Letter,' William Wyler's 1940 film version of Somerset Maugham's short story." He offers faint praise: "It's not bad, and Bette Davis (of whom I'm not usually a fan) was quite good, but I'd rather read Maugham than watch him, so I switched off after Davis spilled the beans to her stiff-uppah-lip lawyer." Even if I weren't Wyler's biographer, I would feel obliged to come to the film's defense. It's better than "not bad," Terry. As I wrote in "A Talent for Trouble":

The picture gets off to a breathtaking start with a long opening sequence. It is a calm tropical night. Light from a full moon floods the plantation. The camera moves steadily, panning through the trees and over the sleeping natives in their hammocks, then through their crowded bunks. The air is thick with humidity. The silence builds. The shadowed darkness menaces. A sudden shot rings out, frightening a bird from its perch. A man stumbles down the front stairs of the main house. A woman follows. She fires a pistol into his limp body until she has no bullets left.

Wyler said he wanted to show everything in a single camera move, and this two-minute, unedited shot was regarded in its time as one of the most admired artistic feats in Hollywood movies. It remains so. "Without a spoken word or a single cut," as I wrote, it "establishes the mood, the scenario and the main character." What's more "Wyler created the entire sequence out of his imagination from little more than a single sentence in the screenplay."

Howard Koch, who wrote the screenplay, "marveled at Wyler's instinct for staging." He especially admired "the precocious mix of film noir effects and straightforward melodrama not just because of nuances that illuminated character and established subtext but because of symbolic details that enlarged the drama." In "The Letter" Wyler had a field day "exploring murder and sexual infidelity, erotic tension and psychological suspense, class snobbery and racial hypocrisy."

Enough said.