Radio review – Lux – “The Letter” (1944) ***1/2

A good critic succeeds in making you look at a work in an entirely different way and Danny Peary was (is) an excellent critic. His review of The Letter made me appreciate the film from a fresh perspective – while Bette Davis has the flashier part as the seemingly-repressed-but-actually-a-steaming-mass-of-sexual-inferno-so-much-so-she-is-driven-to-murder planter’s wife, the lead is actually the lawyer character, played in the film by James Stephenson and here by Vincent Price. He’s a seemingly decent, principled old stick whose fascination with Davis means he ends up suppressing evidence. Herbert Marshall is the husband – he was always good playing cuckolds, was Marshall, even if his interpretation of the role is different from the original story (a dumb man of his hands – Marshall’s ignorance of his wife’s true nature stems more from being an upper class twit, whereas in the story it was because he didn’t really understand women or people).
A worthy adaptation of a strong story; a little sad because James Stephenson had died in the interim between the production of the film and this.