Booksigning and Introduction by David Thomson

We are pleased to welcome noted film critic and author David Thomson and to celebrate the publication this month of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Each edition of Thomson's Biographical Dictionary has been a major work of film criticism eagerly awaited by scholars and enthusiasts alike. Following a booksigning, Thomson presents a lecture introducing PFA's beautiful print of The Letter. Perhaps no film critic writing today has thought and written more on the subject of the supporting actor's contributions to classic films. If you think Bette Davis is the beginning and the end, you'll be pleasantly surprised by Thomson's talk.

Wyler's version of the 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 its performances could balance the unrelenting atmospheric control of Wyler's direction and the persistent undercurrent of Max Steiner's "fate" music. The result is an insightful, sometimes subtle work of art. Bette Davis, the indomitable wife of rubber plantation manager Herbert Marshall, is suspected of adultery after the murder of an intruder. To suppress incriminating evidence, she weaves a web of lies (the thread picked up by the camera), which are 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 about "the man I killed," which only boil over, it is in the scenes between Davis and lawyer Stephenson that the film's true impetus is revealed as a seething, inexpressible sexuality.