Although the version with Betty Davis as Leslie Crosbie is superior, this one with Jeanne Eagles is worth watching, primitive though it may be in filmmaking technique. In the later film, with Davis as Leslie, she is killed at the end of the movie as punishment for adultery and murder by the Chinese woman from whom she bought the letter she had written. We might blame the Production Code for this melodramatic punishment, but it was repeated, at least in implication, in 1982 in the version with Lee Remick. This was not in the original play, in which Leslie intends to try to make her husband happy and hopes he will forgive her, even though she does not love him. The 1929 version with Eagles, however, gets the award for having the most unpunished and unrepentant Leslie. The husband says Leslie will have to stay with him and continue to be bored and lonely, and she responds by saying she still loves the man she killed with all her heart. Also, in the Eagles version, when Leslie goes to get the letter, there is a disturbing scene where prostitutes are kept imprisoned behind bamboo bars. Finally, this version is the most racist of them all in its depiction of Asians.
Review of The Letter
