THE LETTER (1929)
Direction: Jean de Limur
Cast: Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie, Reginald Owen, Herbert Marshall, Irene Browne, Lady Tsen Mei, Tamaki Yoshiwara
Screenplay: Garrett Fort; from W. Somerset Maugham's 1927 play, itself based on a Maugham story found in the 1924 collection The Casuarina Tree
Jeanne Eagels, Herbert Marshall, The Letter
Having watched William Wyler's masterful 1940 film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1927 play 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 interest in Jean de Limur's 1929 version of Maugham's crime-of-passion melodrama. I'm sorry to report I was greatly disappointed, even though Garrett Fort's screenplay is quite similar to the one used 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 madam (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 before the final fadeout so the Code's morality police could be pacified.
In every other respect, the 1929 The Letter is abysmally inferior to the remake. Under de Limur's flat direction, 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. In fact, this version of The Letter 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 (Trouble in Paradise, The Little Foxes, The Razor's Edge, The Fly), manages to appear effortlessly natural. As the soon-to-be-bullet-ridden 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 fleetingly seen as the murder victim.)
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Jeanne Eagels/Herbert Marshall/The Letter photo: Warner Bros. Digital Archives
Grace,
As they say: LOL
Good memory!
I still remember seeing this with you at Cinecon 2004 – the first words I heard when the lights came up were "that sucked!" Thank you for expanding on your reasoning a bit for this review. :-)
Just a quick note.
I had no intention of rewriting history. Those were just my impressions of Jeanne Eagels in a particular film role.
I've been told she's excellent in a silent called "Man, Woman and Sin," with John Gilbert.
Well, let's see…….I think the fault here would have to be the ineffective direction by Limur……..as a matter of fact, he only directed three films in the U.S and was unceremoniously fired and shipped back to France afterward………where he was a director as well but not for the last 31 years of his life……I wonder why?…….perhaps his inability to translate stage actors to film, his complete inability to understand the new sound process unlike, let's say Roland West……and maybe almost as important…….his inability to speak english or desire to learn……..a handy skill perhaps when directing english speaking actors……..I don't know, maybe that's just me……….in order to know how good or bad Eagels was as an actress, we can only go by the eyewitness accounts of all the great actors and directors who knew her on stage who apparently feel she was one of a kind and magical to work with and watch and so forth……….my only suggestion here would be not to try to re-write history on the basis of a film "crafted" by an unimportant hack director whose only real claim to fame is that he knew the actors.
i stll wish i could see this version i have heard so much about her she seems to be a real mystery to me