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Description
Saturday, May 2 @ 3:00 PM
The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Film Studies Center Screening Room)
915 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637
☆THE LETTER ☆
Directed by Jean de Limur • 1929
W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter was a salacious sensation in 1927, with its tale of an adulterous wife in Singapore who murders her lover when he takes on another mistress. Katharine Cornell originated the role of Leslie Crosbie on Broadway, but Jeanne Eagels took over the job when it came time to adapt the property to the newly audible screen. It was a lucky break for Eagels: the volatile actress had recently been suspended from Actors Equity, which effectively barred her from working on Broadway and forced her to seek employment elsewhere. Eagels had already starred in a few silent films, but none of them afforded her the opportunity to present her raw performance style with the immediacy seen here. (By the end of 1929, she would be dead from a drug overdose.) The first talkie filmed at Paramount’s East Coast studio in Astoria, The Letter was an improbable, almost experimental production: direction was entrusted to a novice from France and the facility had not yet been fully prepped for professional sound recording. Remade in 1940 with Bette Davis and the edges sanded down for Production Code compliance, this first version of The Letter remains notable as Eagels’s only surviving talkie — and what a showcase it is. Mordaunt Hall warned in The New York Times that Eagels’s climactic scene was “a severe test of the audible device.” Challenge accepted! Restored by the Library of Congress and the Film Foundation with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. (KW)
60 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Library of Congress
Preceded by: “Dangerous Females” (William Watson, 1929) – 21 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society collection
Date & Time
Sat, May 2, 2026 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Venue Details
Logan Center For the Arts Screening Room 201
915 East 60th StreetChicago, Illinois 60637
