page_title: The Letter (1940 film)
section_title: Plot
hierarchical_section_title: The Letter (1940 film) / Plot
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Bette Davis from the trailer for the film The Letter.
context_page_description: The Letter is a 1940 American film noir crime drama directed by William Wyler, and starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson. The screenplay by Howard E. Koch is based on the 1927 play of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham derived from his own short story. The play was first filmed in 1929, by director Jean de Limur. The story was inspired by a real-life scandal involving the wife of the headmaster of a school in Kuala Lumpur who was convicted in a murder trial after shooting dead a male friend in April 1911. She was eventually pardoned.
context_section_description: On a moonlit, tropical night, the native workers are asleep in their outdoor barracks. A shot is heard; the door of a house opens and a man stumbles out of it, followed by a woman who calmly shoots him several more times, the last few while standing over his body. The woman is Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a British rubber plantation manager in Malaya; the man whom she shot is recognized by her manservant as Geoff Hammond, a well-regarded member of the European community. Leslie tells the servant to send for her husband Robert, who is working at one of the plantations. Her husband returns, having summoned his attorney and a British police inspector. Leslie tells them that Geoff Hammond "tried to make love to me" and that she killed him to save her honor.
  Leslie is placed under arrest and put in jail in Singapore to await trial for murder; that she killed a man makes such a trial inevitable, but her eventual acquittal seems a foregone conclusion, as the white community accepts her story and believes she acted heroically.  Only her attorney, Howard Joyce, is rather suspicious. Howard's suspicions seem justified when his clerk, Ong Chi Seng, shows him a copy of a letter Leslie wrote to Hammond the day she killed him, telling him that her husband would be away that evening, and pleading with him to come—implicitly threatening him if he did not come.
  Ong Chi Seng tells Howard that the original letter is in the possession of Hammond's widow, a Eurasian woman who lives in the Chinese quarter of town.  The letter is for sale, and Ong himself, whom Howard had believed to be impeccable, stands to receive a substantial cut of the price.  Howard then confronts Leslie with the damning evidence and she breaks down and confesses to having written it, though she stands by her claim of having killed Hammond in self-defence.  Yet Leslie cleverly manipulates the attorney into agreeing to buy back the letter, even though in doing so he will risk his own freedom and career.
  Because the couple's bank account is in Robert's name, Howard obtains Robert's consent to buy the letter, but he does so deceitfully, lying about and trivializing its content, leaving out the true circumstances, and giving the man no idea that the price is equivalent to almost all the money he has in the bank. Robert, depicted as a decent man thoroughly in love with Leslie and somewhat gullible, is readily persuaded.  Hammond's widow demands that Leslie come personally to hand over the $10,000 for the letter (she has been released into her attorney's custody) and requires Leslie to abase herself by picking up the letter at the widow's feet. With the letter suppressed, Leslie is easily acquitted.
  During a celebration after the trial Robert announces that he plans to draw his savings out of his account in order to buy a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Howard and Leslie are forced to tell him that his savings are gone, that the impact of the letter would have hanged Leslie and its price was accordingly high. After demanding to see the letter, Robert is devastated to learn from Leslie that Hammond was her lover for years and that she killed him out of jealousy.
  At a party celebrating Leslie's acquittal, Robert tells friends of his plans to buy the plantation. Leslie, overhearing him, leaves the party, and Robert breaks down. Leslie goes to her room, tries to take up her lacemaking but cannot. She sobs. Stepping onto the balcony, she sees a knife laid on the matting. She withdraws, shocked. Robert comes into the room and offers to forgive her if she can swear that she loves him. Leslie at first agrees and tells him she loves him, and that she will do all in her power to make him happy. When he kisses her, she cries "No!" and then breaks down and confesses, "With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!"
  Robert rushes from the room. Leslie looks out at the patio mat, and the knife is gone. She knows that Hammond's widow had planted it there, and then has taken it away. She knows the woman waits for her—to kill her, and she realizes this is her fate. She walks out through the ga
caption: Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie
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