The Letter (1940 film)
The Letter is a 1940 American film noir directed by William Wyler, and starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson. The screenplay by Howard E. Koch is based on the 1927 play of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham. The play was originally filmed in 1929, by director Jean de Limur (The Letter).
Plot
On a moonlit, tropical night, the native workers are asleep in their outdoor barracks. A shot is heard; the door of a house opens and a man stumbles out of it, followed by a woman who calmly shoots him several more times, the last few while standing over his body. The woman is Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), the wife of a British rubber plantation manager in Malaya; the man whom she shot her manservant recognizes as Geoff Hammond, a well-regarded member of the European community. Leslie tells the servant to send for her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall), who is working at one of the plantations. Her husband returns, having summoned his attorney and a British police inspector. Leslie tells them that Geoff Hammond "tried to make love to me" and that she killed him to save her honor.
8 (2008 film)
8 is an anthology film consisting of eight short films centered on the eight Millennium Development Goals.
Topics
Eight directors had "carte blanche" to treat one of the eight topics:
References
External links
The Letter
The Letter may refer to:
Literature
Theatre
Film
- The Letter (1940 film), directed by William Wyler starring Bette Davis, also adapted from the Somerset Maugham play
- The Letter (2004 film), a Thai remake of the 1997 Korean film, also known as Jod mai rak
The Letter (opera)
The Letter is an opera by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout. It was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and was premiered there on 25 July 2009.
The opera is based on The Letter, a 1927 play adapted by W. Somerset Maugham from one of his short stories. The play has been filmed twice. The first version, called The Letter, was made in 1929 and starred Jeanne Eagels. The better-known 1940 version, also called The Letter, starred Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall and was directed by William Wyler.
The inspiration for Maugham's story and his subsequent play came from a real-life event which took place in Kuala Lumpur in Malaya in April 1911.
Development of the opera
The collaboration
Both Moravec and Teachout made their operatic debuts with The Letter. Teachout began writing the libretto in November 2006 and started posting an ongoing account of the opera's genesis and development on his blog, About Last Night, when the commission was announced by the Santa Fe Opera on May 9, 2007. He describes it as "a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don't want The Letter to sound old-fashioned—Paul's musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini—but we do want it to move fast and hit hard."
