Gale Sondergaard in The Letter (1940)
approximately 6 minutes and 2 seconds on-screen
4 scenes
roughly 6% percent of film's total running time
In The Letter, a chunky stew of melodrama and noir featuring an almost delicate (scenery-nibbling as opposed to chewing) performance by Bette Davis in the lead role of Leslie Crosbie, Gale Sondergaard plays Mrs. Hammond, the dragon lady "Eurasian" mistress/wife of the man Davis's character stands accused of murdering. The film's title refers to a love note, purportedly in Davis's handwriting, which threatens to reveal the truth about Leslie's relationship with the dead man and of which, of course, Sondergaard's Mrs. Hammond is in possession. The women, then, are not just romantic rivals but also enmeshed in a much more complex game of cat and mouse.
In The Letter, Sondergaard has few lines and has none in English. She constructs Mrs. Hammond almost entirely through glares, glowers and glances. When viewing her murdered husband's body, her eyes gleam with tears. When she first meets Davis's Leslie, her eyes flare with fury and her lips snarl to a grimace. Davis, for her part, is smart to aggressively volley the eye-contact game with Sondergaard -- theirs is a shared performance of knowing looks, and it deepens each performance immeasurably. Each woman knows more about the other than either would ever say, even without the public humiliation of a translator. And one of Davis's best moments in the film relies upon this wordless eye contact: it's just after Leslie's been declared innocent and is being ushered from the courtroom. Davis's radiant smile freezes to a grim mask as Wyler's camera slides to a view of Sondergaard's Mrs. Hammond, who regards her vindicated rival with mysterious intensity. It's a great moment.
Previously in StinkyLulu's warm-up "overlooked" series:
Mary Alice in Sparkle (1976)
Julie Harris in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
Up next:
Something from 1994 -
Crooklyn? Heavenly Creatures?
Exotica? Vanya on 42nd Street? Go Fish? -
You tell me, lovely reader...
Mary Alice in Sparkle (1976)
Julie Harris in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
Up next:
Something from 1994 -
Crooklyn? Heavenly Creatures?
Exotica? Vanya on 42nd Street? Go Fish? -
You tell me, lovely reader...
6 comments:
Oh man do I love me some Gale Sondergaard. Hooray for this review. I haven't seen The Letter in at least five years. I need to pick it up again, it seems.
And Gale Sondergaard was also in the running to be the Wicked Witch of the West...but lost out when they decided to make her ugly instead of glam.
Her career's pretty amazing that way. (And I think she was hired for the Wicked Witch up until they did that whole batch of recasts...) I find I'm more and more curious about Miss Gale (& I don't mean Dorothy)...
Julianne Moore in Vanya, please. I would love to know how it holds up...
interesting.
She is always interesting which made her fascinating
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