The Letter (1940)

This film could have really good, could have been a great he said, she said sort of film, but it wasn't. Probably because it was made in 1940, when the Hays Code was firmly in place in Hollywood.
The film begins with Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) killing a man, shooting him five times, the last few were probably after he was already dead. She acts surprisingly calm with the whole ordeal and presents a story to her lawyer and the investigator of a plausible, he tried to rape me and I was just protecting myself, story.
While that seems believable, she is nevertheless arrested and charged with murder, and somehow a piece of evidence is uncovered which changes the whole plot. Her lawyer (the solid James Stephenson) breaks the law by paying to retrieve the letter so it would never see the light of day as the letter would prove that Leslie was guilty. She was having an affair with the dead, but married man.
Turns out Leslie's a racist. Davis was known for playing rich women and Leslie is no exception, married to a rubber planation owner in Singapore, she is furious when her elicit lover, Jeff Hammond, marries a Chinese woman (though she is portrayed by the Oscar winner Gale Sondergaard, who is as Chinese as my grandmother). She couldn't stand that he was with someone else so she killed him.
While Davis would play a role similar to this in the future (see the better 1941's The Little Foxes), in this one, she gets her just dessert. She herself is killed in the end.
While Davis was constantly cast as wealthy characters, she manages to make each one of them just a bit different than all the others. But I found Stephenson's performance most effective, sacrificing his dignity for his client and feeling guilty for his actions. Herbert Marshall provided solid support as Leslie's devoted husband, Robert. At least he lived to see the end of the film.
While the film may have been good when he was released, now it is very dated and lacks the freshness needed to keep the viewer truly interested. This is one of Davis's weaker films, not timeless as many of the others. It would have been better if Hammond survived the shooting and tried to say that the sex was consensual and Leslie tried to say it was rape, that would have kept my interest. The fact that the letter was revealed so early on meant that the majority of the film was a waste, which is a shame as Davis deserved better. Grade: B