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There was an abundance of these type of melodramas through the wartime years, and their peculiar rhythms and heightened sense of romance is a language that requires a dexterous tongue. Your mileage may vary, but if you can hop on Love Letters’ preposterous wavelength then its near narcotic sense of romance is potently addictive. I can't say that Love Letters is a good movie, but it’s an intoxicatingly strange one.
In a spin on Cyrano de Bergerac, adapted from a Christopher Massie novel by Ayn Rand (of all people!), finds Joseph Cotten writing love letters on behalf of his Army buddy to his sweetheart, Victoria. Cotten finds himself falling in love with Victoria, more as an ideal than as a corporeal entity, and worries that she’ll be inevitably disappointed by the reality of his Army buddy once they return home. Flash-forward a year and Cotten returns to England to discover his Army buddy and Victoria have died under mysterious circumstances, and meets an amnesic young woman (Jennifer Jones) who holds the key to this murder mystery.
It is here that Jones begins to transform into cinema’s unknowable dream girl, and she plays her part with a disquieting intensity. The material is nearly ludicrous, but Cotten and Jones manage to find a truth to it and make it work. Perhaps it’s that Cotten was best in parts that caused him to become obsessive, think of The Third Man, and Jones possessed a quality that was inherently fey. Love Letters frequently threatens to deflate into twaddle, yet Cotten and Jones go a long way towards making it hypnotic.
I’m not entirely sure if Jones deserved her Oscar nomination for her work here, but she’s quite good in the tragic flashback that unlocks the twisted knot at the center of the story. Throughout too much of the film she displays a mouth that seems to be working independently to the rest of her facial muscles, a peculiar acting choice or uncontrollable tic that she would carry throughout the rest of her career.
Praise must also go to director Wilhelm Dieterle, a man who knew how to adopt and sustain an aura of romance and tragedy no matter how perpendicular to reality that material was. This contribution cannot be stressed enough as Dieterle’s guiding hand keeps a strange brew of amnesia, secrets, romance, murder mystery, and excessively moody lighting bubbling without boiling over. I think his choice to frame it all as a gothic romance was a smart one, as that heightened tone of artifice matches the material quite beautifully.
Love Letters is preposterous nonsense, but it’s the type of studio film from its era that is charming for its refusal to remain tethered to reality. The type of film that no longer gets made, and with good reason as it seems like only this particular era in time could produce something as gloriously bonkers as this.
