Love Letters

William Dieterle’s elliptical, oneiric Love Letters, adapted by Ayn Rand from the novel by Christopher Massie, is a tale of love, obsession, identity, and murder, with strong echoes of The Lost Moment (1947), Vertigo (1958), and especially Portrait of Jennie (1948), another dream-like film in which Jennifer Jones plays a child-like, disoriented woman who comes to fall in love with Joseph Cotten. In this case, Cotten’s a soldier named Alan Quinton who’s been generously writing love letters from the battlefield to a woman back in England named Victoria (to him merely “a pin-up girl of the spirit”), the fiancée of his nonliterary comrade Roger Morland (Robert Sully). When Quinton eventually returns home after an extended stay in a military hospital, he learns that Roger and Victoria had married immediately upon Roger’s homecoming, but both are now dead, Roger stabbed to death by his new bride and Victoria presumably by suicide. Informed that the letters he wrote in Roger’s name had fomented the love affair, Quinton can’t help but feel guilty for their deaths. When he meets a mysterious young woman named Singleton (Jones), the roommate of his friend Dilly (Ann Richards), he feels immediately connected to her, almost supernaturally, eventually learning that she’s an amnesiac who may have been a witness to Roger’s murder. Cecil Kelloway plays Mac, the kindhearted caretaker of Quinton’s estate who keeps watch “like a gargoyle.” Cinematographer Lee Garmes and production designers Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson establish a brilliant atmosphere, alternating between intimate, shadowed interiors and elaborate outdoor sets (a chapel in ruins, a farmhouse in a storm, a horse-drawn carriage) that add a storybook quality, engendering the postwar timelessness in which Singleton and Quinton become lost.