LOVE LETTERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 357, 26 April 1946, Page 30

LOVE LETTERS

(Paramount)

T is a great pity that Hollywood didn’t make a better attempt to get the English atmosphere right for this film

version of Chris Massie’s novel. Even a New Zealand audience is likely to pick that the seasons in Essex are badly out of joint, may wonder whether the local yokels are quite as moronic as they are here made to appear, and may feel some confusion about the accents of the players. I can understand the English critics and the more criticai section of English picturegoers being annoyed about all this. It is unnecessary and careless, and therefore reprehensible; but unfortunately we seem either to have to put up with this sort of distortion or else give up going to all except a very few movies. And I wouldn’t want to suggest that you should do that. In particular, I don’t want to suggest that you should stay away from Love Letters. In fact, having registered a protest about its inaccuracy of setting, ! feel fully justified in drawing attention

to its several good points; in particular, a highly ingenious story.which conducts the audience through a melodramatic maze of amnesia, murder, deceit, and romance without once losing or snapping the thread of plausibility. It may seem improbable that a girl could fall in love with a man simply through the letters he wrote to her, but one remembers the case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where something of the sort occurred. In this case the letters are written from the front in Italy by Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten), acting as proxy for a friend, a casual philanderer, who has met the girl once while on leave. And assuming that the girl was of the peculiarly innocent and spiritual type that Jennifer Jones portrays, one may accept as feasible the proposition that she would fall deeply in love with the writer of the letters, and marry the friend in the belief that he had written them. Assume this, and the other factors in the involved plot fall quite neatly into place: the subsequent discovery that the friend (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) has been murdered and that the girl, who has served a prison sentence, is suffering from acute amnesia which has completely blacked out all knowledge of her past; the marriage of Alan to the girl, even though he realises that his original deceit was responsible for the tragedy; their desperate happiness together under the deepening shadow of her returning memory; and finally the twist in the plot which brings both the characters and the audience clear of the maze. Love Letters owes a great deal to the direction of William Dieterle, who endows with excitement and suspense the tortuous process of unravelling the threads in the plot, and to the photography of Lee Garmes. It owes even more to the restrained acting of Joseph Cotten and the sensitive intensity of Jennifer Jones, who proves that the quality of spiritual exaltation and radi--ance which distinguished her role in The. Song of Bernadette was caused by no mere flash in the pan. It owes a great deal also to the supporting performances of Gladys Cooper and of two Australians, Cecil Kellaway and Ann Richards. If I remember rightly, Miss Richards was once "The Squatter’s Daughter" for Cinesound and gave little sign then of being an outstanding actress. As the friend of the heroine in Love Letters, however, she has an unusually complex role to develop (almost as complex as that played by Jennifer Jones), and she develops it with understanding, skill, and charm. But the film owes most of all to its story. Regardless of acting, direction, and photography, it still remains true that nearly every movie is only as good as its script; and Love Letters happens to have an unusually absorbing one.