THE LETTER – Jeanne Eagels
The Letter (1929)
Direction: Jean de Limur
Screenplay: Garrett Fort, from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play
Cast: Jeanne Eagels, O. P. Heggie, Reginald Owen, Herbert Marshall, Irene Browne, Lady Tsen Mei, Tamaki Yoshiwara
Having seen William Wyler’s masterful 1940 adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and having read quite a bit about Broadway star Jeanne Eagels‘ remarkable talent, I was expecting to find at least a modicum of quality in Jean de Limur’s 1929 version of the tale. I was greatly disappointed even though the plot is basically the same as the one found in the Wyler version:
Stuck on a Malayan rubber plantation with her aloof older husband (Reginald Owen), British subject Leslie Crosbie (Eagels) finds affection in the person of a lively but womanizing playboy (Herbert Marshall). When he abandons her for a Chinese woman (Lady Tsen Mei), Leslie becomes insanely jealous. During an ugly confrontation, she shoots him dead.
At the ensuing trial, the respectable Mrs. Crosbie is defended by the honorable Mr. Joyce (O. P. Heggie), who also happens to be a friend of the family. Everything seems to be going well and an acquittal is certain — that is, until the defense discovers an incriminating letter Leslie had written to her lover.
The owner of the letter, the Chinese woman, wants 10,000 dollars for it; else, she will hand the evidence to the prosecutor’s office. That would most likely mean the death penalty for Leslie.
Unlike the 1940 remake (or the one in 1947, The Unfaithful, starring Ann Sheridan), this version — made several years before the Production Code became fully enforceable — retains the play’s original ending, with Leslie’s crime going unpunished. That’s the one improvement over the remake, in which Leslie had to get her comeuppance so that the Code’s morality police could be pacified.
In every other aspect the 1929 The Letter is much inferior to the remake. In fact, the film is even more static than many of the other talkies made at the dawn of the sound era, feeling about twice as long as its 61-minute running time. Under de Limur’s flat direction, it is little more than a filmed play featuring stage-trained actors who, with one exception, can’t tell the difference between acting for the camera and acting for a theater audience.
Only Herbert Marshall, an excellent performer who went on to have a lengthy and distinguished film career, manages to underplay. As the soon-to-be-stretched-out-on-the-floor playboy, Marshall exudes such low-key charm that it’s easy to understand why jilted-lover-turned-murderess Leslie Crosbie is so mad about him. (In the 1940 remake, Marshall plays Leslie’s henpecked husband; in that version, the lover is only briefly seen as the murder victim.)
Low-key, however, is hardly the appropriate manner to describe Jeanne Eagels’ bombastic talkie début in a role played on Broadway by Katharine Cornell. Eagels, the star of a handful of silent films and a sensation on stage as Sadie Thompson in Maugham’s Rain (unavailable at the time because Gloria Swanson had just produced a film version of the play), acts the part of the adulteress-murderess as if she were playing to the far corners of the gallery.
Her performance is all mannerisms — hand to forehead to show distress, trembling voice to show despair — and no truth. While Bette Davis’s 1940 Leslie is a cool vixen, Eagels’ is more like a shrill ferret. No wonder her lover dumps her for the more self-controlled Chinese madam. Especially upsetting is that Eagels’ screeching all but ruins what should have been the film’s climactic last scene, in which the unpunished Leslie defies her husband, society, and morality to declare, "With all my heart … and all my soul … I still love the man I killed!"
Paradoxically, despite my strong reservations about her performance, Jeanne Eagels remains the main reason for watching the 1929 version of The Letter for Her Leslie Crosbie is the only extant talking performance of the legendary actress whose tragic life would end with a drug overdose (apparently a suicide) in October of that year. (During his brief directorial career in Hollywood, de Limur also helmed Eagels’ other talkie, Jealousy, which, curiously, would also become a Bette Davis vehicle: Deception, in 1946. Jealousy is a lost film.)
Eagels was considered for a best actress Academy Award for the period 1928-29 (there were no official nominations that year), thus becoming the first performer to be posthumously considered — or (unofficially) nominated — for an Oscar.
Academy Award Nomination*
Best Actress: Jeanne Eagels
* There were no official nominations that year.
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Tags: Film Reviews, Herbert Marshall, Jean de Limur, Jeanne Eagels, Oscar 1929, Oscar Movies, Pre-Code Hollywood, Reginald Owen, The Letter, W. Somerset Maugham
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