Scott Coblio  (July 2007)

Rating:   of 5

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

I give this film five stars--not for being perfect from start to finish
(which it isn't--but neither were most of the scripts Joan was usually 
enlisted to elevate for MGM)--but for Joan's knockout performance in 
the (in)famous poisoning sequence, which requires her to run an 
emotional gamut ranging from quiet dread, abject humility as she 
literally begs for a chance at happiness, smoldering resentment as it 
is denied, shattering resign as she lets go of her dream of a new life,
of ANY life, then what can only be described as celebratory hysteria 
when Renault takes the poison she intended for herself. Once he begins 
to die from its effects, we see a suddenly-lethal Letty who has fought 
for her life and won, but at the cost of becoming a murderess.

The problem lies in the first two thirds of the film leading up to 
this-- "Letty" walks the usual tightrope between soap opera and 
melodrama that Joan patented and did better than anyone else, but the 
film--like "Rain" which followed it--is parched for physical action, 
talky to a fault, and the lengthy dialogue is nowhere nearly as clever 
or as cute as the screenwriters, director, et al, apparently thought it
to be. Joan, of course, is gorgeously lit, coiffed and dressed in her 
Adrian finery, but the cruiseship romance/love triangle formulas are 
not given enough of a twist until too late. By the time the plot heats 
up, the viewer has already been exhausted by too much idle chatter.

That said, Joan makes up for it in the aforementioned Renault-death 
scene. Her performance here is actually very modern. Listening to him 
perish from the next room, with no more pathos than a lioness has for a
dying animal she has hunted, Joan's face seems to have undergone some 
transformation into something almost ugly and bestial. Not content to 
just HEAR him expire, she stalks back into the main room to watch his 
death throes. Her face, her posture, her movement, all betray a woman 
who still wants to attack, to rend and kill this oppresser with her 
bare hands. But there is no need, for the poison is doing it for her. 
Watch how she snatches the phone out from beyond his grasp as he 
lunges to call for help. And her stridence when she tells him she's not
sorry. The Letty character is letting herself feel her own bloodlust, 
with no apologies and no remorse. Like a prototype for the female 
protagonist in "The Burning Bed" (still decades away),  she has ceased 
to be victimized and in her way is enjoying this act of revenge. And 
part of that revenge is letting him SEE that she's enjoying it. She is 
no longer prey. Having turned the tables on her predator, she has 
discovered that she--like Renault-- can now oppress, cause suffering, 
that she too can kill.

Once Renault is dead, and the threat he posed neutralized forever, 
Letty collapses, her rigid posture melting immediately into heaving, 
relieved sobs. She is crying, but not tears of regret. Surprise! While 
the standard Crawford heroine would have been overcome with remorse and 
surrendered to authorities, Letty still wants her freedom! And in fact 
Renault has wreaked such havoc on her life by this time that the viewer
is compelled to view his execution as a public service. With 
characteristic resilience, Crawford wipes her fingerprints off all the 
doorknobs and glasses, then stalks out of the hotel-room-turned-crime-scene 
(but not before grabbing his framed picture of her, in a gesture that was 
probably not meant for comedy--for she seems to locate it almost by scent!).

She arrives at her loveless mother's house in the early morning hours, 
laconically answering the old woman's questions about her whereabouts 
with blatant lies. After all, her mother was only the first in a long 
line of people who have failed Letty--does anybody deserve the truth? 
Having exterminated the enemy, Letty thus retires to bed until the 
inevitable police sirens.  But as Letty said to Renault as he lay 
dying, "if I hang for it, I'm glad I did it!"

Joan would of course play madwomen and bitches after "Letty Lynton", 
but never so bewitchingly or with such abandon for the audience's 
sympathy as she does here. Nor with such complexity, for in "Letty", 
she is neither victim nor villain, but rather something poised 
uncomfortably between.

Stephanie   (October 2005)

Rating: -1/2 of 5

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Joan is "Letty Lynton," a seemingly gay but actually rather emotionally confused young woman who can't quite seem to figure out what to do with herself. Rejected by her mother ("Home and mother. I wonder who ever put those two words together."), New York socialite Letty has spent the past 3 months debauching in South America with a smouldering, dangerous Latin Lover (Nils Asther as "Emile Renaul") in the type of clubs "where society dances with the underworld" and patrons, searched for weapons upon entering, don't go home 'til daylight.

The interesting moral ambiguity of the story presents itself immediately with Letty's indecision: One minute she's languishing in Emile's arms saying she'll stay with him forever; the very next, she's suddenly disgusted with herself and him and their decadent lifestyle, threatening (as she has several times before) to abandon him and return home to New York City.

This time she's serious about leaving and does sail for New York. Aboard ship she meets the pleasantly charming and rich Jerry Darrow (Robert Montgomery), who, unlike the seedy Emile, would rather talk than kiss. This pureness of heart is initially a bit annoying---Letty and Jerry's early conversations are weakly written and their on-deck scampering more cloying than actually cute. A redeeming scene, though, comes on Christmas Eve, when apparently all passengers but Letty have received greeting wires from someone at home. Jerry, seeing Letty's stricken expression, gallantly pretends that he, too, hasn't received anything---a touching, sweet gesture that made me forget about the earlier overdone cuteness.

Upon their arrival in New York, the couple are greeted by a wild press mob eager for news about their just-announced engagement. Also on hand is Emile, who doesn't yet know about Jerry and is eager to reunite with Letty and take her back to South America. Letty pretends to greet him warmly, then skips out on him, only to have him show up at her mother's house later that evening, threatening to reveal Letty's letters to the press and to Jerry if she doesn't meet him at his hotel that evening. (Seemingly unfortunately for Letty, her cold, disapproving mother---who's already ignored Letty's Christmas gift, barely welcomed her home, and said she's untrustworthy---happens to overhear this conversation...)

The scene at the hotel is intense and frightening---we've been told that Emile is "dangerous" and indeed, he does strike Letty twice as they argue, but what is actually the most spooky and dangerous thing is the look on Letty's face and in her eyes during most of this scene---a borderline-demonic (yet subtle, if "subtly demonic" is possible!) blend of eroticism and revulsion. Emile notices this, too: After Letty's expressed her loathing of him and there's a brief lull in their fighting, he picks up a poison-laced glass of wine that she has fixed with the intention of killing herself. As she watches him drink, and makes no move to stop him, her eyes are glitteringly fascinated and he says, smugly misunderstanding: "You look as though you were interested in me once again." And, suddenly she is, embracing him hysterically before asking to be left alone for a moment. After he leaves, she is completely still as she listens to him singing in the next room; she has an expression of palpable distaste, but there's much more than that... The camera lingers on her expression for a long time, and I had to keep replaying the instant to try to figure out what it was that was so disturbing and compelling about it... Perhaps it was the sheer complexity of how Joan was channelling the character---at that moment I didn't feel like I was watching an actor playing hatred and guilt and morbid curiosity, but rather a real person actually feeling those things. You rarely see such complicated emotions adequately transferred to the screen by any actor---the shock that you feel when you do see it makes you realize and appreciate the skill involved.

And the scene doesn't let you off the hook here. Finally, Letty goes to the other room to see what is happening to Emile. The two look at each other for an instant as he's dying, and finally Letty can't stand it a second longer and lets loose, eyes again glittering ferally: "Yes, I did it! I meant it for myself...I'm glad I did it! You dirty, filthy, greedy mongrel! I'm glad I did it! If I hang for it, I'm glad I did it!" The intensity here is similar to what Joan would only months later conjure up in Rain as Sadie Thompson in Sadie's famous rant against the Reverend Davidson (which also gave me goosebumps). But even that scene can't compare to Letty's outburst here. Sadie's just plain mad at Davidson for his hypocrisy, but Letty's anger at Emile is more primally a pure bloodlust and desire for revenge. She hates him for trying to ruin her new pleasant life with Jerry, but also hates him because he's a reminder of her own decadent past that she's perhaps still tempted by.

Despite the rather slight plot-line, Letty Lynton's morally complicated characters make this film unusual and interesting: Letty is clearly confused and rather disturbed by both her recent and her family past (immediately after Emile is poisoned, Letty goes home from his room to mother, who, inappropriately for that moment, chastises her for not "naturally" bringing her fiance Jerry home to meet the family; Letty wearily replies "Several natural things might've happened this evening, Mother, if you'd ever cared anything about me. It's too late for that now.") Aside from Letty's non-cardboard heroine, Emile is also not a cardboard villain---he'd clearly become used to Letty's caprice and understandably couldn't quite figure out when "No" really meant "No"... Even the "mean mother" ultimately reveals an unexpected depth of feeling. The film was banned in England for its non-PC denouement, but it's that very element of surprise that made this film so interesting to me.

Oh, and how could I not mention the clothes?! Also starring in this picture are the now-iconic dresses by Adrian---the organdy shoulder-ruffle dress that created a nationwide fashion craze (selling 50, 000 copies at Macy's in NYC alone), the high-collared fur-trimmed coat and Garboesque skullcap, the ultra-glam gold lam้ dress, the black-and-white shoulderless dress only briefly seen at the beginning of the film but immortalized by Hurrell...

Letty is rarely seen today because of copyright issues that have prevented its public release or showing on television; the fact that it remains a talked-about and important part of Joan's cinematic legacy is a tribute to its iconic style (as well as to the bootlegs out there that continue to showcase Joan's highly interesting, intense performance).

The one-two punch of Grand Hotel and Letty Lynton, released within a month of each other in the spring of '32, established with both the public and critics that Joan Crawford was a first-class actress as well as a star. Rain, released in the fall of the same year, wasn't so successful at the time, but this triumvirate when regarded today points to 1932 as the most cinematically productive and important year of Joan's career.