That Famous Opening Sequence
THE LETTER is one of my favorite films, but one of the disadvantages of modern technology is that it often shatters the myths we’ve been raised on:
The film's famous opening sequence – a long tracking shot beginning with a rubber tree and ending at the Crosby bungalow, where a shot is heard and a man lurches out of the door, followed by Bette Davis pumping bullets into him – has often been praised over the years, and justly so. Davis wrote in MOTHER GODDAM: “This long opening shot in THE LETTER is, in my opinion, the finest opening shot I have ever seen in a film. This was due to the genius, and I used the word advisedly, of William Wyler, our director.”
“I felt this opening shot should shock you,” Wyler later related. “To get the full impact of the revolver being fired, I thought everything should be very quiet at first. I also wanted to show where we were, give a feeling of the dark, humid jungle atmosphere of rubber plantation country. We had a nice set. The day before we started, I laid out the shot. The camera started in the jungle, went on to the natives sleeping, showed the rubber trees and ended on a parrot awakened by the shot and flying away, all in one camera movement that took more than two minutes. This was the first day of shooting and since none of this was really in the script, we would end up with a quarter of a page in the can. You were supposed to do three or four pages a day. On the first day of shooting, I had one quarter of a page...the whole studio was in an uproar, but it became a famous opening scene.”
"...all in one camera movement that took more than two minutes."
Wyler himself apparently encouraged the idea that this scene was one long continuous take, but when the sequence is examined more closely, it becomes obvious that this wasn't quite true. On Warner Home Video’s DVD of THE LETTER, this opening sequence begins 59 seconds into the film – then, at 0:02:05 (two minutes and five seconds into the film) as the camera passes over the thatched roof of the natives’hut, a dissolve joining two separate shots is visible – it’s extremely well-done, and probably went un-noticed by film audiences at the time, and it certainly doesn't take anything away from the brilliance of that opening sequence...9 seconds later – at 0:02:14, that first shot is heard, and immediately we are caught up in Leslie Crosby's web of deceit...
Those of you who think you know everything should politely defer to those of us who actually do! share