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A Make and a Remake: Both good for different reasons

I am talking about the Bette Davis movie, The Letter, and the Ann Sheridan film, The Unfaithful. 

You can watch both on TCM or YouTube. They are posted now on YouTube. 

Both involve a woman who kills a man she had an affair with and goes to trial. She is married, and she does a lot to keep her husband from knowing the truth, including lies. 

Other than that, they are very different because of their time period, the supporting actors, the motive, the actress, and the morals the director wanted to show. 

Bette Davis: set in the 1920s or '30s in the tropics on a rubber plantation. The murdered man is married to a native woman who is pretty spooky. 

Ann Sheridan: set in California after WWII. Her husband was away for two years and has come back to build a successful business. Their marriage was a quickee-going-off-to-war matter and they do not really know each other. 

 Bette Davis: None of the other actors stick in someone's mind much. Herbert Marshall plays the doting and rather dull husband who believes all her stories. Gayle Sondergaard is the half-Asian wife of the murdered man. 

Ann Sheridan: Zachary Scott plays her husband, Lew Ayres her lawyer fan, and Eve Arden steals the show as a divorced friend and cousin of Scott's character. They are fun to watch. 

Bette Davis:  At the end of the movie you learn that Bette more or less lured the man there to kill him. She lives on a plantation far from town, safe from neighbors seeing what happens. Bette as a murderess trying to cover her tracks is totally believable.

Ann Sheridan: Ann Sheridan could not kill anybody! Not on purpose. The lover from the short-lived affair had been stalking her. One night, she comes home late and he is there waiting for her. They struggle dramatically, and she kills him. A simple self-defense plea doesn't sit with the detective, and more and more clues come out.  A sculptor, he had sculpted a head of the socialite Ann, and his widow is ready to blackmail her or let the world know. There is a trial, and she is acquitted. Her husband wants a divorce but the lawyer gets them to reconcile. 

Bette Davis is the better actress; I watch everything I can see her in. (Except the one with Joan Crawford.) Ann is just beautiful. She does okay but the plot is more melodramatic. 

Hollywood at that time had to punish wrongdoing. Bette is lured away by the widow of her victim and murdered herself, with help, but she has been so duplicitous to everyone that it makes sense. Ann gets off and will perhaps reconcile with her rich husband. It would have been better if they hadn't, plot wise. There is no trust there after her lies and affair with the loser. 

Now, what is different is the moralism in The Unfaithful. There are some long sermons/speeches by Eve and Lou about how Zachary should forgive her and understand what went on when all the soldiers left; Lou wants to assure them they can get through this travesty and repair their marriage. The speeches are interesting but not really good filmmaking. The director/writer wanted to get a point across too badly. There is more tell than show. They should have ended with splitting, with maybe hope of something later. Bette's movie ends like A Doll's House, which I consider the perfect play. (Although I will say that directors have Torvald slapping Nora and that is not in the original script by Ibsen.)

It's always interesting how the same basic story is molded differently by various writers and directors. 


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