A Film Canon

Unlike Wyler's earlier chamber dramas, The Letter prioritises the veranda, rather than the house, extrapolating from it an obsession with all the boundaries broken by the circulation of a message from imperious plantation mistress Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) to her lover. This document has romantic, racial, legal and ethical implications, and achieves a malign omniscience encapsulated in Wyler's elevation of its lines into a pervasive striation, encompassing the slatted plantation house windows, Leslie's obsession with lacework, and the striped couch where she makes her confession. In the process, it produces a strong noir aesthetic, generating a proliferation of low ceilings, as well as a dependence upon moonlight, itself generalised into a series of ghostly, elastic white presences, whose rubbery stain clings to the characters with the same insistence as the starched suits that seem to constitute their wardrobes. Not only does this clarify Leslie as a proto-femme fatale, but it provides a claustrophobic compensation for the semi-exterior focus, as if to remind us that, in the tropics, every space exudes its own sickly intimacy. Hence the ingenuity of Wyler's occasional sequence shots, whose extreme fluidity just testifies to the camera's immersion in an viscosity destined to decelerate it, along with the ambitions of every European character. From this angle, the film's racist subtext is most noticeable in its depiction of Westerners at the limits of their capacities, perhaps explaining the choice of Eurasian as object of horror, along with Davis' ghostly reflection of its facial indeterminacy.