TCM showed two
different movie versions of W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter
yesterday, and in seeing them both, I couldn’t help but think of a bad movie
sequel (to the 1940 Bette Davis version). So here it is: The Letter 2: Postage
Due:
This movie begins
as the movie The Letter ends: Bette Davis is killed by the wife of her
lover, Hammond, and thus begins the plot mechanism of the sequel. And,
naturally, Bette Davis’s killer is arrested and put on trial for murder.
And Davis’s lawyer from the first movie is blackmailed into being her
attorney because he suppressed evidence from the previous trial in the last
movie, so he has no choice but to represent her in court. And what do you know,
but in this case Herbert Marshall produces the titular letter, proving that
Bette Davis asked someone to come meet her, which everyone assumes to be her
lover’s wife, who is now on trial, and the motive was to leave no witnesses to
the original killing. And so now her lawyer says the accused was lured to see
Bette Davis and had to kill her in self-defense, and she is thereupon
acquitted, since everyone now knows Bette Davis killed her lover, Hammond. And
then, to mend their betrayed broken hearts, Herbert Marshall and his wife’s killer
get married. And who could possibly have guessed it, but her father owns the
rubber plantation he wanted to buy at the end of the last movie, and he makes a
wedding present of it to them, and so they escape from Singapore and the whole
dirty affair, and they live happily ever after, until they get bored, take
lovers, and the whole torrid murderous business replays itself, and here we go
again, setting up another sequel… The End.
And the sequel
would be called (of course): The Letter 3:
Return to Sender.
This is The
Letter:
