AWARDS AND HONORS

The Letter was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actress (Bette Davis), Best Supporting Actor (James Stephenson), Best Cinematography, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Editing and Best Musical Score.

The Critics' Corner: THE LETTER

"A superior melodrama, compounded of excellent acting, insinuating atmosphere and unrelaxed suspense...Miss Davis is a strangely cool and calculating killer who conducts herself with reserve and yet implies a deep confusion of emotions. James Stephenson is superb...But the ultimate credit for as taut and insinuating a melodrama as has come along this year-a film which extenuates tension like a grim inquisitor's rack-must be given to Mr. Wyler. His hand is patent throughout."
– The New York Times

"One of the best pictures of the year...Bette Davis has to divide honors of this great triumph with, first, William Wyler, the director, and secondly, with Max Steiner for his most interpretive music; this triple creation was the height of fine picture making. The star was never better in a role that called on every ounce of her great ability. Wyler's handling of his people and his direction of Tony Gaudio in the photographing, was nothing short of genius. The musical background of Max Steiner is truly his masterpiece, and a great contributing factor to the success of the show."
- Hollywood Reporter

"Meticulous little Director William Wyler has packed this picture with atmosphere, an elusive quality for movie. He keeps the audience strained with a most effective dramatic time bomb – the constant feeling that something very bad is about to occur. Bette Davis helps with a display of psychopathic evil as repulsive as her Mildred in ...Of Human Bondage [1934]. Herbert Marshall, more limber than usual, behaves appropriately for a true-blood British colonel. James Stephenson, hitherto confined to furnishing British background, gives the part of the lawyer a distinguished, neatly devised piece of acting...[Tony] Gaudio's fine photography represents the kind of perfection that is automatically expected from the skilled, unpublicized, tight little fraternity which grinds Hollywood's cameras."
- Time Magazine

"...never has the [W. Somerset Maugham play] been done with greater production values, a better all-around cast or finer direction...Set is of tremendous proportions and the music by Max Steiner is particularly noteworthy in creating and holding a mood, as well as in pointing up the drama."
- Variety

"Bette Davis's 43rd movie; it marked her 10th year in films, and it is one of her few good vehicles...Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the passion of a woman who'd kill a man for trying to leave her. She is helped by an excellent script (by Howard Koch) and by two unusually charged performances--James Stephenson as her lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband. The cast also includes two formidable women--Frieda Inescort, who seems ineffably absurd as the lawyer's wife, and Gale Sondergaard, whose performance as the Eurasian woman was actually taken very seriously by many people."
– Pauline Kael "A superbly crafted melodrama, even if it never manages to top the moody montage with which it opens - moon scudding behind clouds, rubber dripping from a tree, coolies dozing in the compound, a startled cockatoo - as a shot rings out, a man staggers out onto the verandah, and Davis follows to empty her gun grimly into his body . . . [The] camerawork, almost worthy of Sternberg in its evocation of sultry Singapore nights and cool gin slings, is not matched by natural sounds..."
- TimeOut London

"...A fine performance by Davis; no one is better at playing characters who act their way through life...Wyler's direction is very moody; there are long passages in which dialogue is sparse or nonexistent and the erotic tension is built through Max Steiner's music, shadows, sounds...the moon floating through the clouds, character movements and expressions. The worst aspect of the film is the embarrassingly invidious portrayal of the non-white characters, which almost justifies the colonialists' matter-of-fact racism."
- Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic

"The Letter remains a great, bursting melodrama of the sort that hinges upon censorship saying you can't show the sex - and so the desire builds out of all proportion and it becomes a study in yearning and the way desire can wreck every civilized system."
- David Thomson, Have You Seen...?

"Excellent performances and presentation make this the closest approximation on film to reading a Maugham story of the Far East, though censorship forced the addition of an infuriating moral ending."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"With a great sequence to open and close the film, a wonderful turn by Davis combining her effervescent skills at being ladylike and selfish, and an appropriate female enemy in sinister, impassive Gale Sondergaard (as the spider woman wife of the man Davis killed), you'd think The Letter would play far better than it does....Unfortunately, most of the screen time is afforded to Stephenson...Like Frankenstein's monster in the Universal horror classics, The Letter keeps its prize creature too long in the shadows. But a Davis movie cannot withstand scrutiny without her, and even a bad Davis movie where she's hamming and mugging and even humiliating herself is more fun than practically no Bette at all."
- Jeremiah Kipp, Slant Magazine

"Though W. Somerset Maugham's story could easily have been filmed as a turgid melodrama, director William Wyler's magnificent handling of the material and Bette Davis's taut and calculated performance converted it into enduring cinematic art. The Letter is as good today as it seemed upon its first release. Though Davis's strong performance is the film's center, Herbert Marshall (who had played the lover in an earlier version of the story) is excellent as the long-suffering husband, and James Stephenson actually manages to steal scenes from his costars as the honest lawyer who puts his career in jeopardy for a friend."
- TV Guide

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume