Unknown Correspondent Woos Unknowing Amnesiac In Dark Wartime Romance

DIRECTED BY WILLIAM DIETERLE

STREET DATE: MARCH 14TH, 2023/KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS

Although best remembered today, if at all, for its 1945 Academy Award-winning title-song, with lyrics by Edward Heyman and music by score-composer Victor Young, first performed by singer Dick Haymes but most famously covered by Ketty Lester in 1961 – also performed frequently both before and after by artists as varied as Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, Alison Moyet, and Diana Krall – Love Letters as a film might give one a similar sense in viewing of uncertain remembering; not quite deja vu but more vaguely familiar, and not quite known but yet insistently resonant. That subsequently inescapable pop musical artifact does play persistently through the sonic, non-diegetic background of the romance, drama, and mystery score-unfolding over the next 101 minutes, minus the lyrics, as an eerie instrumental. But even beyond the hazy musical familiarity there’s a pronounced performing style, atmosphere, and story-intensity at additional play, further marking Love Letters with the heady visual and aural sweep of displaced memory.

Call it the mid-1940s of it all, for lack of a better definition. But as director William Dieterle’s 1945 film Love Letters, screen-adapted by none other than Ayn Rand from a contemporary bestseller, and co-starring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones in the second of four films they would appear in together, does deal narratively and thematically with an injured psyche, along with the perhaps not all to sensitive romantic probing of domestic trauma. The war-era then at its end, and the mentally difficult burden of both remembering and forgetting just beginning, might further suggest a certain shimmering tension between the time it was made and the era of its setting, playing not unlike a haunting refrain of music. Kino Lorber Studio Classics, from a recent 2K scan of the 35mm film, brings the mid-1940s romantic melodrama mystery of Love Letters back to its original visually music-like life this past March, possibly convincing many similarly amnesiac classic movie viewers that they may have seen – and heard – it all before, even if they can’t remember exactly where.

While the nine-word plot description heading this review is broadly accurate, the various complications to that premise and its multiple layers of displacement – spatially, temporally, and of course mentally – all make for a singular viewing experience. Along with the story-driven coincidences and, I would argue, its additionally fascinating plot-contrivances, the effectively overwrought direction, photography, and performances, I would again argue, create and sustain a heightened emotional tone equal to and worthy of the film’s title. British officer Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) is shown writing the title letters in a bombed-out cafe near the end of the European war as the film opens, not to his own sweetheart but rather on behalf of a friend in his regiment named Roger Morland (Robert Sully) to Morland’s fiancee back in England. In the writing guise of “Roger Morland”, Quinton wistfully admits to “spiritually” putting his heart into these letters, but will as yet admit to only helping a friend as a sort of writerly or academic exercise.

A time-ellipsis of a war injury and release back to civilian life later, during which Quinton inherits the small family estate where he grew up from a recently passed aunt and the services of her faithful former retainer and groundskeeper Mac (Cecil Kellaway), Alan has changed his mind about those letters he wrote during the war and decides to seek out the female addressee he knows only as “Victoria”. As he soon finds out, however, he has already briefly encountered his phantom literary-lady at a homecoming party given by his friend Dilly Carson (Ann Richards) in the childlike but charming, slyly cat-fancying guise of one Singleton (Jennifer Jones). Later learning her tragic backstory in the interim of the war’s ending, in which the woman previously known as Victoria Morland was exonerated by reason of temporary insanity from the violent death by stabbing of her abusive husband, and also in which Victoria’s elderly foster-aunt (Gladys Cooper) was rendered stroke-paralytic following the fatal act, Alan nevertheless resolves to romantically pursue the traumatized, amnesiac, yet incredibly lovely object of his spiritual heart’s desire, now made physical.

Further unfolding in ways I invite viewers to discover for themselves, in which the unknown letter-writer soon marries an unequivocally unknowing woman, Singleton/Victoria’s past unfolds slowly to her own (and the viewers’) attention, but is essentially buried beneath layers of emotional scar-tissue. The compelling, undeniably romantic yet also queasily disturbing mixture of plot- and character-elements, against the similarly layered visual and aural background of classic studio-filmmaking – the film inexorably building towards the impossibly attractive figures stepping towards a magnificent studio backdrop, crane majestically rising over dimmed klieg lights, full-orchestral score thundering behind – both conceals and reveals the darker undercurrents rippling just beneath its sheen-like surface. Sometimes categorized as “film noir”, even on its latter-day Wikipedia page, Love Letters is not really, but its noir-ish elements do serve to make its more heartfelt and strangely hopeful recognition, and ultimate dispersal, of war-era trauma stand out in bold(er) relief.

Much of this light-dark effect, I believe, can be credited to the even-then established screen-dynamic of Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, the latter stolid and poetic in his dream-eyed if (morally) questionable love quest, while Jones’ inherently multi-faceted Singleton/Victoria is given an ethereal frisson every time a (frequent) close-up reveals a flicker of doubt, pain, or remembrance beneath her wide-eyed and cherub-like features. Wild-eyed and spookily fey at other times, the screen presence of Ms. Jones in particular, by that point Mrs. David O. Selznick, has something mysteriously undefined lurking just behind those eyes and that smile, waiting to burst out and through its carefully studio-crafted image-making.

Again, call it the studio system fascinatingly at odds with itself, sacrificing sense for sensation, splashed gorgeously across monochrome silver screens of the era, and Love Letters itself emerges from its already heightened artifice to reality-bending levels of, may I suggest?, sublime overkill. Mounting implausibilities, self-contradictory characters, pat and morally-restricted resolution, all true; but the sheer level of commitment at every level of production – from script to performances to direction to music to cinematographer Lee Garmes’ light-and-shadow sculpted imagery – creates another level of screen-reality that is less easy to define, uniquely and irreplaceably Hollywood.

“Pretty silly stuff”, as KL commentators Bryan Reesman and Max Evry report a decades-later reaction to a revival screening of Love Letters, during a William Dieterle retrospective in the 1970s, from LA Times critic Kevin Thomas. Well, to each their own, but by including both positive and negative reactions, Reesman and Evry bring a wide variety of sources and points of view to their compelling interpretation and deep-delve into Love Letters. Citing everyone from a representative of the Ayn Rand Institute to typically voluminous memoranda from stars-loaning producer David O. Selznick addressing fellow independent producer Hal B. Wallis, the latter of whom oversaw the production of this film while (wisely) ignoring the (unasked for) advice from his (notoriously) micromanaging colleague, the commentary admirably stays on-track to the plot and characters onscreen while remaining both informative and interesting. While also somewhat cautious in their appreciation of this movie, the possibly Ayn Randian “selfish” romantic pursuit of a mentally ill woman in particular giving both commentators pause, their discussion of the film noir-ian/ish qualities invariably ‘infecting’ contemporary romances, melodramas, “women’s pictures”, mysteries – all of which Love Letters encompass – reinforces the timely combination of style, personalities, and storytelling devices that dominated Hollywood films of this era to its present-day viewing advantage.

I suppose it only remains to say that this new master looks unsurprisingly superb on this Blu-ray, the various visual registers on which the film operates – light, darkness, shadow, and haze alternately and invariably mirroring the protagonist’s equally varying mood or mental state – alongside the similarly advantageous aural variety of sound-effects and background music, are all admirably reproduced for one’s further high-definition, home-viewing appreciation. Ending here some forty-screen years later with a source as unlikely as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), perhaps unknowingly invoking the semi-forgotten, half-amnesiac lyrical/musical quality of this very film in the frankly unsavory guise of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth, and ‘addressed’ to Kyle MachLachlan’s possibly not-so-innocent “neighbor” Jeffrey Beaumont, these “Love Letters” are indeed “straight from [the] heart” of Hollywood dream-making.

Images used in this review are credited to DVDBeaver and are taken from Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release.