The Letter (Warner) is almost actionless. It opens with a murder, somewhat later shows a creepy sequence among hidden hallways in the Chinese quarter of Singapore. Otherwise the plot is unwound with conversation rather than movement — usually fatal for cinema. Furthermore, it is a rather conventional mystery story, the tale of a sly and devious wife (Bette Davis) of a British rubber planter (Herbert Marshall) who murders her lover when he appears to be losing interest. There is a trial, an acquittal, a day of reckoning. Moving, as it does, at a laggardly pace, it should, according to all the rules of movies, be just another dreary episode in the cinema's crime cycle. But it isn't.
Meticulous little Director William Wyler has packed his picture with atmosphere, an elusive quality for movies. He keeps his 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 that other Somerset Maugham cinema success, Of Human Bondage. Herbert Marshall, more limber than usual, behaves appropriately for a true-blue British colonial. James Stephenson, hitherto confined to furnishing British background, gives the part of the lawyer a distinguished, neatly devised piece of acting.
But they might all have gone down in a sea of verbiage without the mood of pursuing doom running from scene to scene. For this, the bows may well go to Cameraman Tony Gaudio, whose slanting shadows and subdued photography make the tropic atmosphere more ominous than the leer of any villain.
The tone is there from the start when Gaudio's camera looks on the lifeless landscape of the rubber plantation. Moving slowly, it picks up the dripping of tapped rubber trees, a thatched hut filled with sleeping natives, another hut hung with drying rubber strips, glides beside a fence to where a pigeon is drowsing. The silence is heavy with long, sharp shadows. Suddenly a shot splits the still air, the pigeon flaps off, a figure staggers onto the porch of a house in the background.
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. Directors, actors, writers, producers are expected to falter and blunder now & then. But the cameraman's record must be faultless; he must go quietly about his business, supervising the lighting, arranging camera angles, advising the director on effective touches. He must operate his 425-lb. contraption of multi-lensed, cog-wheeled intricacies with as much dexterity as if it were a Leica. With shooting time costing $20 a minute and with no chance to see the results until the following day, he cannot afford errors.
Used to their comparative anonymity, cameramen lead the most normal lives of Hollywood's high-salaried citizens, rarely appear in the gossip columns or at Goldwyn, Mayer or Zanuck parties. They own houses, raise families. Professionally, they are tied in a union as exclusive as a London club, the American Society of Cinematographers, which, until its recent application for an A. F. of L. charter, had no truck with national affiliations. It costs $100 to join, holds a closed-shop contract with all major studios.