1929 The Letter staring Jeanne Eagels

I'm posting this for old movie fans and any others interested in forgotten movie history.

1929 was one of the very first years of ''talkies'' when the movie industry developed the ability to include sound with visual images, so this movie was one of the first.

I will set the scene for you so you can watch this closing four minutes of the final scene.

An American man has brought his wife to Singapore to live. He works in the rubber industry. She, bored, takes another American man as a lover and carries on with him for several years behind her husbands back, until he meets a Chinese woman and falls in love with her and drops the American woman like a hot potato.

The spurned woman sends him a letter requesting him to come and meet her and he goes to her while he leaves the letter with his new Chinese lover.

When he gets to her house, she kills him.

She goes on trial claiming he broke into her home and was raping her.

Meanwhile the Chinese lover has taken the letter to the American woman's lawyer and blackmails her for $10,000.

She pays the money and without that evidence is found innocent.

Her lawyer though is a man of honor and presents her husband with the truth.

As the scene opens, the acquitted woman sits demurely in her home waiting for her husband to come in after he has been presented with the truth and the letter of her guilt from the lawyer.

If you watch this, never mind the husband, just keep your eyes on the actress, Jeanne Eagels. Pure madness.

Purple.
Like a chow's tongue.
No man can resist.

And five years before the Hays censorship nonsense began, thus allowing a bit more flexibility. (Although I admire how directors 'worked around' the Hay code until its banishment in the late-60s; they fired imaginations.)

The Bette Davis 1940 remake eleven years later is fascinating, with a particularly unsettling final scene.

I've never seen this version, so I'll get stuck into it soon. Ta very much.