“Love Letters” has one of the least stereotyped or believable plots in movie history and has almost as much story per second as “Intolerance.” It is so weighted with plot that its hero no sooner steps through a door than he is faced with an unexpected, important visitor, and he and the heroine are usually seen between events in a vehicle rushing to make the next sensational development. The story starts with a reserved, mooning, soft-hearted soldier (Joseph Cotten) writing some love letters for a no-good fellow soldier. The letters are so sentimentally bad and dull they should dissatisfy even a D. W. Griffith heroine, but they cause the girl who gets them (Jennifer Jones) to marry the no-good soldier. He is soon murdered with a butcher knife by the girl’s guardian (Gladys Cooper); whereupon the guardian has a paralytic stroke and the girl loses her memory. After a year in prison, the girl marries the man who really wrote the letters, and during their first happy months together, she recalls one fact after another from her past until she remembers everything. There isn’t one wholly credible development in this story, but in the last half of it, at least, there is a good deal of tension, excitement and real passion.
“Love Letters,” which is directed in a scrupulous, well thought-out way by William Dieterle and photographed to the teeth by Lee Garmes, is one of the few current films in which there is an appreciable attempt at eloquence. The scenes are planned and set up with unusual care (to the extent that the transitions are economical, nice and so artful, they are usually the best parts of the movie); the pace is solemn and deliberate; there is the feeling that every last bit of majesty or momentousness is being sought for in a patient, hard-working way; and the playing is a kind in which action and expression are made very full, exact, slow and elegant. Occasional stretches have real grandeur. In a long speech made by the heroine at her trial, the lighting is soft and radiant; the speech is well written and is delivered in a sensuous, slow way that makes the scene very moving and passionate. In several scenes the expression is enlarged by switching suddenly and contrastingly to a close-up of the heroine, who at that moment is in the center of a vivid action. One such scene, in which the heroine is crying, becomes awesome and terrifying through this technique of abruptly changing subject matter and time and making Miss Jones seem almost to overflow the screen, and also by the startling lushness of the acting.
For the most part, though, the movie seems stagy, fancy and wooden rather than expressive. In most scenes there isn’t enough action or purposeful conversation, though there will be good occasional effects in a graceful, deliberate gesture, usually of Cotten’s, or in a facial mannerism of Ann Richards or Miss Jones. The outdoor shots, in either idyllic or scary English countryside, have a very synthetic quality, and the ones indoors seem not much less cooked-up. Too much of the imagery is like the photography in Vogue; however, though Mr. Garmes’s photography lacks virility and takes everything at its prettiest, it is composed in light and dark with great handsomeness, is sharp and clear with details, and is consistently more respectable than almost any other photography in Hollywood.
The movie is filled with wistful, vapid, played-out characters, but its heroine is different, very well conceived and acted. She is an innocent, dissociated person who lives for the moment, enjoys it thoroughly, is frank, wise, unconventional, and given to elaborate, affected actions and facial expressions. Miss Jones’s playing almost always seems too rich and somewhat amateurish—she stops on a radiant smile or a contemplative look too long to seem not to be acting and there are usually a couple of degrees too much sway in her walk. But a good deal of the affectation is apt for the character; the elaborate style of playing fills the movie, which is often so wooden, with a lot of human emotion and energy; Miss Jones is accurate and exciting enough to give her role a surprising originality and interest. Alongside Miss Jones’s lush manner, Joseph Cotten seems to disappear from the screen, but he plays some unusual, very individual actions perfectly—such as a scene in which he is perplexed, surprised and highly pleased when he knocks on a friend’s door and is met unexpectedly by the heroine. There is a harmonious, elegantly articulated performance by Ann Richards as a cold, efficient woman who is very concerned for the heroine.
October 8, 1945