The Letter
Short description
On a rubber plantation near Singapore, Leslie Crosbie shoots and kills a man she claims attacked her. Her husband, Robert, accepts her account without hesitation, and the family lawyer, Howard Joyce, takes on her defense. The case turns on a letter Leslie wrote to the dead man, which his widow holds and which undermines the story of self-defense. Leslie's confession to Joyce forces him to choose between his duty to her and his obligations to her husband.
William Wyler directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Howard Koch. It was Wyler's seventh feature as director, following The Westerner and preceding The Little Foxes. Bette Davis leads the cast as Leslie, with Herbert Marshall as Robert, James Stephenson as Howard Joyce, Frieda Inescort, Gale Sondergaard and Bruce Lester among the thirty-seven credited players. Warner Bros. Pictures released the film on November 21, 1940, and it runs ninety-five minutes.
Audience response has been solid but not unanimous: on IMDb it holds 7.5 out of 10 from roughly 16,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.3 from about 253 votes. A critics' rating of 8.6 from fifteen reviews places it noticeably higher than either viewer score, suggesting that reviewers regard the film more favorably than general audiences do.
What's left behind the scenes
- Director William Wyler (1902-1981) first shot the scene at the beginning of the film, in which Leslie shoots Jeffrey Hammond, played by David Newell (1905-1980). The entire action on screen lasted only two minutes, but the scene took a whole day to film, and it didn't even contain a single line of dialogue. Studio executives expected filming to proceed at a rate of 3-4 pages of the script per day, but the opening scene of the film, consisting of just one paragraph on the first page, took an entire shooting day.
- Jack L. Warner (1892-1978), president of Warner Bros., initially asked director William Wyler to test James Stephenson (1889-1941) for the role of the lawyer. Wyler did so, Stephenson was perfect for the part, and Wyler had already cast him, but then Warner objected (he was concerned that audiences wouldn’t recognize Stephenson, and he wanted to cast a well-known actor). It ended with Wyler having to argue to keep Stephenson in the film’s cast. He found himself once again needing to quarrel and advocate for an actor that Warner had initially suggested, then changed his mind about for some reason.
- According to Bette Davis (1908-1989), James Stephenson often argued with William Wyler and even occasionally left the set in anger. After that, she had to catch up with Stephenson and persuade him to return to continue filming.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
