The Letter (1929) Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie (Pre-Code) Workprint

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The Letter (1929) Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie (Pre-Code) Workprint (Size: 973.51 MB)
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Description

The Letter (1929)



Director: Jean de Limur



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020092/
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http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=81288
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http://www.jeanneeagels.com/id9.html
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Writing credits

Monta Bell dialogue

Mort Blumenstock titles

Jean de Limur dialogue

Garrett Fort adaptation

Garrett Fort screenplay

W. Somerset Maugham play





Marooned on a rubber plantation in the East Indies, Leslie Crosbie turns to Geoffrey Hammond for the love and diversion that she does not find with her husband. Hammond falls in love with a Chinese woman, however, and Leslie shoots him dead. Placed on trial for her life, Leslie convinces both the jury and her husband that she killed Hammond in defense of her honor. The Chinese woman has an incriminating letter written by Leslie to Hammond, however, and Leslie must pay to recover it. Her husband foots the bill, and Leslie is faced with a bankrupt and loveless future.



Jeanne Eagels ... Leslie Crosbie

O.P. Heggie ... Joyce

Reginald Owen ... Robert Crosbie

Herbert Marshall ... Geoffrey Hammond

Irene Browne ... Mrs. Joyce

Lady Tsen Mei ... Li-Ti

Tamaki Yoshiwara ... On Chi Seng

Kenneth Thomson (as Kenneth Thompson)





Format : AVI

Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave

File size : 973 MiB

Duration : 59mn 53s

Overall bit rate : 2 270 Kbps

Writing application : Lavf51.12.1



Format : MPEG-4 Visual

Format profile : Simple@L1

Format settings, BVOP : No

Format settings, QPel : No

Format settings, GMC : No warppoints

Format settings, Matrix : Default

Codec ID : DX50

Codec ID/Hint : DivX 5

Duration : 59mn 53s

Bit rate : 2 000 Kbps

Width : 720 pixels

Height : 480 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 1.500

Frame rate : 29.970 fps

Standard : NTSC

Resolution : 24 bits

Colorimetry : 4:2:0

Scan type : Progressive

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.193

Stream size : 857 MiB (88%)

Writing library : Lavc51.40.4



Format : MPEG Audio

Format version : Version 1

Format profile : Layer 3

Codec ID : 55

Codec ID/Hint : MP3

Duration : 59mn 53s

Bit rate mode : Constant

Bit rate : 256 Kbps

Channel(s) : 2 channels

Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz

Resolution : 16 bits

Stream size : 110 MiB (11%)

Alignment : Aligned on interleaves

Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)

Interleave, preload duration : 24 ms

Writing library : LAME3.97





USER'S comments - tcm

c

Date: 05/19/2006

Eagles is Incredible

Jeanne Eagles, in her Oscar nominated role, plays Leslie Crosbie in direct contrast to Bette Davis's more famous interpretation. Where Davis's Leslie is cool, Eagles' is nervy and fidgety. Yet, you can see in this actress the qualities that Davis would make famous beginning in the thirties. I wonder whether Bette ever saw this film. Eagles' revelation of the truth to her husband at the end of the film remains an excellent example of fine screen acting. A bit of trivia: Herbert Marshall, Davis's husband in the 1940 version, plays Leslie's lover here.





Trivia for The Letter (1929)

The film's star, Jeanne Eagels, died of a drug overdose shortly after this film was released. It was one of only two sound films she made.





The American movie debut of British character actor Reginald Owen.





First posthumous Academy Award nomination for an actor: 'Jeanne Eagles' for Best Actress 1928/29.





First American film of Herbert Marshall, who plays Leslie Crosbie's murdered lover. In the 1940 remake, he plays her husband.





IMDB

User Comments (Comment on this title)

5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful:

Stunning, 8 December 2007





Author: d



Jeanne Eagels is brilliant in this short version of THE LETTER. My copy is lousy but I stuck with it because Eagels gives an amazing, Oscar nominated performance that keeps you riveted to the screen. I can only image the power this woman had on stage.



The story is the same as the Bette Davis version, but the narrative structure is all different. Eagels has two fabulous scenes: the trial and the finale. Her English accent slips a couple times but for a 1929 movie (and her talkie debut) it's a terrific performance as the amoral Leslie Crosbie.



Herbert Marshall, O.P. Heggie, and Reginald Owen co-star. But the film belongs to Miss Eagels. If only her follow-up and final film JEALOUSY could be found!





16 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-

Cries out for a restoration!, 20 April 2002



Author: from Ontario, Canada





The Letter is an absolutely fascinating early talkie. The only surviving talkie made by the legendary stage actress, Jeanne Eagels (whose skill as a Broadway stage actress was obvious in the delivery of her lines - particularly the final scene, which I found mesmerizing) cries out for a restoration! The print of the film I viewed had a very poor visual quality (although I could always discern the action), but became all the more tantalizing - this film probably looked great in 1929, and would still look wonderful in a refurbished print. For a very early "talkie", I was very surprised at how natural and "unstodgy" the dialogue is (and the soundtrack was remarkably clear and strong, with even a little bit of profanity, which I'm sure it raised a few eyebrows in 1929!) It is very unfortunate that Eagels' other talkie "Jealousy" is now lost, and all the more reason that "The Letter" (being the only sound document of this legendary actress) should have a wider distribution. I hope someone some day will spearhead such an undertaking.





15 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-

Fascinating early talking picture with an equally fascinating star., 26 March 2005

Author: from United States





This film has recently been restored to a 35mm print. I was fortunate enough to see it. A great deal is already said here about Jeanne Eagels' performance. The only thing I can add is that Bette Davis seems to not have so much modeled her performance in the remake, as to have modeled her own physical persona in general on Eagels, who has a subtle body twitch that Davis took to (delightful) extremes later on. Certainly Davis would have seen this original movie version, and may have even seen Eagels on stage in other properties.



The sound is very primitive in this early version. At first it seemed like the sound wasn't even working. But the problem is that there is no sound until the film gets to a scene that has dialogue. It would have been interesting to hear more ambient sound added so you would be less likely to notice the old-fashioned audio, but then purists might complain.



Nevertheless, the film is fascinating and so is Eagels. I saw the film with an Asian friend who liked the fact that the film doesn't shirk from racism. The sequence where the heroine delivers the letter to the dragon lady was fun to compare to the later version. The early version is a lot racier! Also, I must point out that Herbert Marshall, who appears in the later version as the heroine's husband, is very young and handsome as her murdered lover in this 1929 production.





13 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-

A knockout performance by Jeanne Eagels, 14 April 2000

Author: from Paterson, NJ





Only currently available through the American Film Institute, which restored the film, this features a remarkable performance by one of the great stage actresses in the early part of the 20th Century.One sees immediately why Ms. Eagels was a star; this is a powerful, emotional tour-de-force which lasts a little over an hour. Little more than a filmed stage play for the most part, this film is a very important re-discovery that deserves to get into better circulation.





12 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-

Eagels fascinates in her only surviving sound film, 8 April 2005



Author: from new york





I was fortunate to see a rare screening of this (early) 1929 film. The lure for me was Jeanne Eagels, and her performance did not disappoint. Her screen presence is amazing - there is scarcely a performance from this early talkie period to compare it with. If Eagels was alive at the time (she died in October 1929), if Paramount had more clout with the MGM-dominated AMPAS at the time, she surely would have won the Academy Award for Best Actress (it went to Mary Pickford in one of the WORST performances of the period, in the nearly-unwatchable "Coquette"). Her final confrontation with her husband, one of the most dynamic pieces of film acting from ANY period, is alone worth the price of admission.



This film exists only as a work print, without final dubbed-in music and sound effects, which may be disconcerting to some viewers, but thank God Eagels' performance survives intact. The storyline is similar to the 1940 remake but without several plot variations imposed by the Hays Office, and in many ways this earlier film seems more modern, complete with a few profanities and obvious depictions of a brothel (that scene, with Eagels' character humiliated in front of a bevy of Asian prostitutes, is amazing). The casual racism of colonialists on display throughout the film may be off-putting when viewed today, but is historically and dramatically appropriate.



Rights to this film apparently belong to Universal, so the chance of its being distributed on DVD - along with the many wonderful Paramount pre-1934-code films, the brilliantly restored Technicolor "Follow Thru" and "Paramount On Parade", etc. - is slender-to-none. No studio cares less about its pre-1948 catalog, especially the Paramount titles, and we can only pray that whoever heads their video division will be replaced by someone who knows and loves this eminently under-exploited catalog. In the meantime, Run, don't walk if this is screened in your area, and experience this beautiful and vibrant star who influenced a generation of actresses (not the least of which, Bette Davis, who took much from Eagels).









10 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-

Jeanne Eagels outstanding in early talkie., 11 May 2000



Author: from Putney, VT





It was only the second year of the Academy but already they were voting politically - Jeanne Eagels' brilliant performance in this creaky early talkie had to make do with an Oscar nom and the statuette went to the worst performance ever to win - Mary Pickford's in COQUETTE. The only existing print was a work print without music or final editing, but wherever it's shown, Eagels stuns and captivates with her beguiling, powerful performance. She is so convincing on the witness stand that while we know she is lying through her teeth (we did after all SEE her kill the man), we in the audience find ourselves, like the jurors, believing in her innocence, before we suddenly catch ourselves. THAT is GREAT ACTING. The film needs to be made available on video so that the world can enjoy this terrific performance again. (One silent of Jeanne's exists in archive print - MAN, WOMAN AND SIN - and her only other talkie, JEALOUSY, is "lost," so this is the only document we have of her. Run to see it (when it first came out of the archives to be shown in NYC in the early 70s, the Village Voice printed a full page review, worshipping the Eagels performance).





12 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-

The last scene is magnificent., 7 April 2005



Author: from Minffordd, North Wales





Jeanne Eagels is one of those film figures who are notorious rather than famous. She was a beautiful stage actress who scandalised Broadway with her erotic performance as Sadie Thompson, the hooker in Somerset Maugham's "Rain". Her film career started promisingly, but her drugs addiction became increasingly difficult to conceal. By the time she made her last film, her arms and legs were nearly as thin as broomsticks, and she resembled a blonde skeleton. She died in her thirties. Like a few other movie figures (Houdini, George M. Cohan, Fanny Brice) her own movies are less well-known than the movie ABOUT her, in Eagels's case the bio-pic starring Kim Novak (who was much more beautiful than Eagels ever was).



'The Letter' is Eagels's first of two talkies. Like her most famous role, this film is based on material by Somerset Maugham, and takes place in that same Oriental tropics milieu: in this case, Singapore. This early talkie is a very crude effort. There was apparently a music soundtrack which is now lost, so (except for one sequence) there's no music at all, and several sequences which *ought* to have music are now silent. Elsewhere, we see various exterior shots in which silent action (of a car moving soundlessly down the road, for example) contrasts jarringly with the dialogue sequences. One reel change occurs *during* a shot, when Mrs Crosbie (Eagels) takes the witness stand, so the last frames of one reel are repeated at the start of the next reel. On the positive side, this movie (filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island) creates a credible facsimile of the Singapore jungles.



This is the same story that was remade with Bette Davis, but there's one major difference. The remake begins with Mrs Crosbie (Davis) killing her lover: we don't know what led to this, and as the action unfolds we must decide whether she is lying. In Eagels's version, we see the argument between Mrs Crosbie and her lover, so we know the truth. The remake's gambit is much better.



Herbert Marshall appears in both versions: here, as the murdered lover; in the remake, as the cuckolded husband. Marshall had lost a leg in the trenches of the Great War, and wore a prosthetic limb through his entire film career. In his later films, he had a clumsy lurching walk. Here, he rises from a couch quite gracefully. I usually like Reginald Owen, but here -- as the cuckolded husband -- he's stiff and mannered, lumbered with Victorian dialogue.



There are some regrettably racist comments about Orientals in this story, including the famous line 'Damn peculiar, these Chinese'. Eagels's character berates a Chinese woman as 'a vile yellow thing', and this really doesn't stand out from the mood in the rest of the film. The Issei actor Tamaki Yoshiwara, playing a Chinese man educated by whites, speaks his dialogue in one of the strangest accents I've ever heard: is this genuine, or did the director impose it on him? O.P.

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The Letter (1929) Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie (Pre-Code) Workprint

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