Wyler's 1940 version of a Somerset Maugham play - set in Malaya, where the expatriates rage - contains some of the most forceful craftsmanship Hollywood had to offer: only the strength of a performance by Bette Davis could balance the unrelenting atmospheric control of Wyler's direction and the persistent undercurrent of Max Steiner's “fate” music to create an insightful, even subtle, work of art. Davis, the indomitable wife of a rubber plantation manager (the ever-dominated Herbert Marshall), is suspected of adultery after the murder of an “intruder” while her husband is away. To suppress incriminating evidence, she weaves a web of lies (the “thread” picked up by Tony Gaudio's camera) believed by her husband but not by her lawyer (James Stephenson). Even more than in the scenes between Davis and Marshall, which smoke; more than in her passionate outbursts (“With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!”), which only boil over, it is in the scenes between Davis and Stephenson that the film's true impetus is revealed as a seething, inexpressible sexuality.
The Letter presented a problem to Hays Code Hollywood, with a murderess and an adulteress who “goes free” - to live, in the Maugham play, a fate worse than death with the man whom she does not love. The retribution invented for the film version, ironically, only serves to reverse Maugham's sentence: in a moment of twisted sisterhood Davis is released through the vengeance of the murdered man's Eurasian wife. (JB)