THE LETTER, 1940

SARA: Our next film is THE LETTER, a 1940 William Wyler film starring Bette Davis as a murderess on a plantation in Singapore. And it is hella disappointing. I picked it up from the library because we watched the opening scene as part of the "Daily Dose of Darkness" tidbits I've been getting in my inbox as part of the TCM course, and the opening scene works like gangbusters. No fucking around, just get to the "empty your gun at a dude" part!  The next few minutes as Davis' character explains herself to her husband and the authorities works well too, and then there's the rest of the movie to sit through.

WALLACE: One of the taglines for the film was "And I wish I could say I was sorry," which set up Davis' character as some sort of femme fatale. But she spends most of the film making lame excuses for her behavior in the opening sequence. Yeah, she's bad ... but in a way that seems more fitting for the police blotter than a film noir. I can think of a dozen other Better Davis characters that would eat this one for breakfast.

Even though, Davis is still the star of this picture. Her character isn't written any better or worse than the rest, but she's got a real magnetism. And that's coming from somebody who's never been a fan of her work.

SARA: Well I think the problem with the film might be that the movie isn't quite sure who the star of the picture is. Unlike most films noir, THE LETTER doesn't have a viewpoint character.  There's no voiceover and no specific point of view, which is an interesting contrast to DARK PASSAGE, our last movie.  So when the movie is lazily moving pieces around the board, in and out of lawyers' offices and jail cells, there's nobody talking to the audience giving us any sort of internal perspective to liven the place up. There's the Bette Davis character, who's rather hard to sympathize with, and there's a lawyer whose name I never bothered to remember who has the fakest and briefest crisis of conscience I've ever seen, and the film can't make up its mind who it's really following.  So instead it just sort of spins its wheels through the second act.  It picks up a little bit at the end but by then it's too little too late.

I did appreciate the Hays Code used specifically as a suspense mechanism; once somebody gets away with murder in a court of law the audience knows the clock is ticking down and she's gonna get it.

WALLACE: I just realized that somebody didn't get their just desserts: Davis' friendzoned lawyer friend, who took part in extortion, perjury and a host of other shady deals to get her acquitted for murder. The most he suffers for his crimes is a brief bout of the flop sweats.

Is this a good time to talk about racism? Because that's when THE LETTER gets weirdly complicated. Old Hollywood movies are like that relative we all have who thinks racism is measured entirely by how much you use the N-word. There might not be any slurs uttered in THE LETTER, but that doesn't mean it gets a pass for how it treats its Asian characters.

SARA: Oooh, yeah. Every fan of old movies cringes when a movie busts out the plinky "Asian music" in the first five minutes. "Don't be racist don't be racist don't be — GODDAMNIT!"  And no, before I get an inbox full of snotty comments about how I'm too stupid to realize that things were different back then, I know things were different back then and it is entirely possible to enjoy a film while simultaneously not thinking it's okay and that it's worth pointing it out.  I will not soon forget bringing home HOLIDAY INN in blissful ignorance of the Lincoln's Birthday number.

WALLACE: I'd love to talk more about this film, but there's not much to chew on. The first and final minutes of the movie are terrific, but the meat of the film is forgettable. Even its casual racism is half-assed. The film wants to have things both ways: We're supposed to sympathize with Gale Sondergaard as "Inscrutable Asian Dragon Lady" because her husband's murder went unpunished ... but it's really hard to sympathize with a character who doesn't speak, change facial expression, etc.

Sondergaard's character is almost a symbol for the film's major problem, now that I think about it. The characters are just too sketchy to care about.

SARA: And too faux-exotic!

Dat opening tho...