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.

April 29, 2004 10:53 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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