Don't start watching this film unless you're prepared to sweat. The Letter is not a courtroom drama; it's a moral steam bath, a tropical Kammerspiel where the humidity of the Malaysian jungle blends with the miasma of lies. William Wyler, here at his peak as a ruthless formalist, doesn't direct: he suffocates. Forget the “Wyler Touch” as a synonym for prestige and good taste (that will come with Mrs. Miniver). This is Wyler the entomologist, trapping his characters in a claustrophobic mise-en-scène, using depth of field (thanks to the genius of Tony Gaudio) not to open up the world, but to compress it, to crush the characters against the set, against their own destiny. The heat is not a backdrop; it is an active protagonist, a viscous shroud that envelops everything.

The film opens with one of the most powerful statements of intent in the history of cinema. Not a scene, but a semiotic prologue. A slow, almost indolent tracking shot through a rubber plantation. The moon (a visual leitmotif that will become the impassive eye of God) illuminates the leaves. A native worker sleeps in a hammock. Civilization (the colonial house) is asleep. Then, the silence is shattered. A gunshot. Another. A man (Geoffrey Hammond) stumbles out of the veranda and collapses. And after him, she. Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis). She doesn't run, she doesn't scream. She walks, with icy calm, empties her magazine into the man on the ground, and only afterwards does she stop, as if awakening from a dream. In this single, masterful sequence shot, Wyler has already told us everything: the apparent calm of colonial civilization, the primordial violence smoldering beneath, and the lie that is about to be constructed.

This is Bette Davis' stage. And Wyler, known for his obsessive search for ‘truth’ through dozens of takes (the famous ‘Wyler's Ear’), works a miracle: he strips Davis of her most incendiary mannerisms (no hysterical crises à la Jezebel) to reveal something much more terrifying: absolute control. Davis' Leslie Crosbie is a cold-blooded reptile, a masterpiece of calculated repression. Her weapon is not a gun, it is lace. Wyler constantly films her crocheting, her needles moving with rhythmic precision, an activity symbolic of domestic virtue that becomes a visual metaphor for the web of lies she is weaving. She is the only cold thing in the whole of Malaya. While the men around her sweat, fan themselves, and melt (morally and physically), she sits upright, composed, an iceberg of bourgeois hypocrisy.

The plot, based on a short story and play by W. Somerset Maugham (the supreme chronicler of the moral dissolution of the British Empire), is built on a lie that can only exist in that context. Leslie claims to have acted in self-defense, to protect her honor as a white woman from the aggression of a drunken Hammond. In an instant, the entire colonial apparatus—the police, the administration, the justice system—mobilizes not to find the truth, but to protect the symbol. They must believe her story, because to question the honor of a white woman would be to question the very foundations of their moral superiority, the justification for their presence there. The Letter is a fierce critique, though perhaps unconscious to 1940 audiences, of the hypocrisy of the “White Man's Burden,” where “civilization” is only a facade as thin as the veranda of the house.

The film is populated by men who are, in various ways, instruments or victims of this facade. There is the lawyer, Howard Joyce (a superb James Stephenson, who earned an Oscar nomination), the man of logic and law, the pragmatic “fixer.” When the proof of Leslie's guilt—the “letter” of the title, a MacGuffin that is the dead weight of the entire film—emerges, his task is no longer to serve justice, but to orchestrate the cover-up. He becomes an accomplice to corruption, and his moral descent is marked by the sweat on his brow. But the real victim, the epicenter of the tragedy, is the husband, Robert Crosbie (Herbert Marshall). And here the film performs an act of meta-textual genius: Marshall, in the 1929 adaptation, played the lover (Hammond's role). Here, he is the betrayed husband. He is the good, simple, honest man, completely blind to the rot in his own house. He is the embodiment of misplaced trust. His tragedy is not only that he has been betrayed, but that he is forced to buy the proof of that betrayal, using every penny of his fortune to save not his wife's life, but his own illusion. He is an empty shell, a man ruined financially and spiritually.

The moral pivot of the film is the woman who hardly ever speaks: Mrs. Hammond (Gale Sondergaard). If Leslie is the cold, artificial light of Western civilization, Mrs. Hammond is the shadow of the title. She is the exotic Other, the Chinese/Eurasian wife that the colonial establishment pretends does not exist. In keeping with the Orientalism of the time, she is presented as mysterious, draped in chiaroscuro, almost ghostly. Yet she holds all the power. She is the one with the letter. The scene in which Leslie is forced to leave the safety of her colonial bubble to venture into the “native” quarter—a labyrinth of shadows, beads, and hostile glances—to buy the letter is her descent into hell. It is a masterpiece of humiliation. The white “Queen,” the mistress of the plantation, is forced to kneel (metaphorically) at the feet of the woman she widowed, to endure her gaze of pure silent hatred, throwing the letter at her feet like a bone. It is the moment when hypocrisy is laid bare.

The ending is a masterpiece of artistic compromise, dictated by the Hays Code. In Maugham's story, Leslie gets away with it, even though she is condemned to live with a husband who knows. For 1940s Hollywood, the murderer (and adulterer) had to pay. And so, Wyler orchestrates a ritual execution. Leslie, after her chilling confession to Robert (“I still love the man I killed!”), can no longer hide behind lace or the law. Her passion, finally admitted, is a cancer that has consumed her. She goes out into the garden, no longer protected by the house, and enters the territory of the “shadows.” The moon, the eye that saw everything at the beginning, now illuminates her for her executioners. Leslie's murder at the hands of Mrs. Hammond's men is not only justice, it is a cosmic rebalancing. It is the jungle, the primordial world that her civilization sought to suppress, that takes back what is rightfully hers. The Letter remains a perfect autopsy of lies, a film where every frame is dense with meaning and every shadow is heavier than reality.