The Letter is a 1940 American crime film noir melodrama directed by William Wyler, and starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson.

The story was inspired by a real-life scandal involving the Eurasian wife of the headmaster of a school in Kuala Lumpur who was convicted in a murder trial after shooting dead a male friend in April 1911.

[citation needed] Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a British rubber plantation manager in Malaya, shoots dead Geoffrey Hammond, a well-known member of the expatriate community.

His clerk, Ong Chi Seng, tells him a letter exists that Leslie wrote to Hammond the day of the shooting, imploring him to come that night while Robert was away.

Ong tells Joyce that the original is in the possession of Hammond's widow, a Eurasian woman who lives in the Chinese quarter.

He shows Joyce a copy, revealing Leslie's clear culpability in her ex-lover's murder, and conveys that the original is for sale, at a staggering price.

As a party celebrating the acquittal gets underway, Leslie discovers a dagger on her porch which she recognizes from the shop where she retrieved the letter.

The Production Code Administration rejected the original story adaptation that Warner Bros. submitted on the grounds that it contained adultery and unpunished murder, so a new final scene was added in which the widow Hammond takes her revenge.

[2] Director William Wyler and star Bette Davis, who had previously worked together on Jezebel, disagreed about the climactic scene in which Leslie admits to her husband she still loves the man she murdered.

In his review in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther observed, "The ultimate credit for as taut and insinuating a melodrama as has come along this year — a film which extenuates tension like a grim inquisitor's rack—must be given to Mr. Wyler.

Miss Davis is a strangely cool and calculating killer who conducts herself with reserve and yet implies a deep confusion of emotions .

[4] Variety magazine wrote, "Never has [the W. Somerset Maugham play] been done with greater production values, a better all-around cast or finer direction.

[5] Time Out London said in 2012, "A superbly crafted melodrama, even if it never manages to top the moody montage with which it opens - moon scudding behind clouds, rubber dripping from a tree, coolies dozing in the compound, a startled cockatoo - as a shot rings out, a man staggers out onto the verandah, and Davis follows to empty her gun grimly into his body .

[The] camerawork, almost worthy of Sternberg in its evocation of sultry Singapore nights and cool gin slings, is not matched by natural sounds (on the soundtrack Max Steiner's score does a lot of busy underlining).