Letty Lynton

An extraordinarily fine romantic melodrama, and I wish there were an available print in higher quality; I don’t know much about Clarence Brown, but judging by all the Garbos plus White Cliffs of Dover it’s just possible no one could saturate an image with more romance than he could. Crawford doesn’t play her usual scrappy working girl this time, coming from money and with a mysterious and tragic past, but the situation is largely the same as her archetype: she’s trapped by circumstance, has a glimpse at real happiness, and must fight to the death to get and keep it. Letty is estranged from her mother and has been flitting between exotic countries, ensnared in a passionate and abusive relationship with dashing & dangerous Emile Renaul. Nervously, uncertainly, she makes a play to escape, jumping on an ocean liner to return to New York.

Oh boy, do I love a shipboard romance, between Love Affair, History is Made at Night, now this. Just think of it, it takes weeks to cross the Atlantic, and as Robert Montgomery soon proposes, all there’s to do is:

Breakfast, tennis, shuffleboard, soup, lunch, deck chairs, cocktails, dinner.

And Crawford points out:

That leaves only the night.

Ah, nothing better suited to Hollywood romance than three weeks out of time, away from life, falling in love with strangers, and spending days idly and nights actively. Well. Montgomery & Crawford meet, and it’s love at first sight, but an interesting courtship: two lonely hearts, both from money sure, but gun-shy and awkward, and it takes almost the whole trip for marriage to come up, which is sort of a long time for a movie like this. By the way, someone like Robert Montgomery could definitely win me with a line like this:

They tell me the female likes to be pursued by the male, so here I am.

So everything seems right in the world, but of course Renaul is waiting for poor Letty on the dock. From heady romance the film veers to real horror: everything the film wants one to feel, one feels palpably. Renaul doesn’t just grab her a little roughly to suggest his violence; he is actually menacing and does knock her around. Her desperation is clear and warranted, and although one always does feel sorry for Crawford characters, I found myself rooting out loud for what she must do and hoping like hell she’d get away with it. Of course, the resolution is probably something that could only happen to the fabulously wealthy, but my inclination toward social responsibility has not yet returned. Crawford’s great in this, and Montgomery’s a perfect stand-by-your-gal match. A really superlative film of its kind in every way.