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(More customer reviews)"I think of you, my dearest, as a distant promise of beauty untouched by the world'-a promise to be reached in spite of the terror and ugliness around me. If I never see you again, my last thought will be that I had fought for you and lost'-but I had fought." So reads a letter penned by a British officer on the Italian front, in the 1945 movie "Love Letters." The story was based on a little-known novel by an obscure author, Chris Massie. The screenplay was written by Ayn Rand.
The movie, directed by William Dieterle, stars Jennifer Jones as the mysterious Singleton and Joseph Cotton as British officer Alan Quinton. Victor Young composed the lush, romantic music score, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
"Love Letters" contains scenes of an emotional intensity found in no ordinary story-'scenes that no one short of a Victor Hugo or an Ayn Rand could have conceived. I can never forget Jennifer Jones seated before her cottage fireplace, dazed, as the love letters she treasured go up in flames'-a knife in her hand, blood smeared across her dress, and her husband dead at her feet. Or her scream, years later, as she sees red berries crushed against her white dress, and remembers.
Seeing "Love Letters" is like discovering a new work of fiction by Miss Rand'-for the movie departs so radically from the unfocused novel it was based on that it almost constitutes an original work. She took a few suggestions and situations from Chris Massie's sprawling, unfocused book, and developed them entirely along her own lines: intensifying the moral conflict inherent in one man writing another man's love letters, and building events logically to a stunning climax.
It was she who conceived of the central event of the movie, the horror of which Alan Quinton first learns of in the basement of a London newspaper. Following up mysterious hints about the woman he is trying to trace-'the unknown woman he wrote love letters to'-he searches through the back issues that the office boy brings him, until he finds the article he is looking for, yet dreads to find: "Officer Murdered; Wife Held." He sits there for hours, reading it over and over, stubbing out one cigarette after another in dead silence. "Who was the murderer?" the office boy asks him, as he finally walks away. "I was," he says.
It was Ayn Rand, who in 1945 was just mapping out the plot of "Atlas Shrugged," who invented the central situation of the screenplay: the irony of an impossible love, in which a woman cannot be told that she is her own rival who is stealing her husband's love away. And it was Miss Rand who invented the horrendously powerful climax-'in which we see the murder of the man who "tried to get happiness by stealing another man's soul"-'with Singleton sitting before the fireplace, staring dazedly at the knife in her hand, her hands and dress smeared with her husband's blood-'as the camera zooms in on the words of a burning letter: "I think of you, my dearest, as a distant promise of beauty untouched by the world ..."
Miss Rand, believe it or not, brings this tragedy to a benevolent conclusion.
"Love Letters" is full of joy, tragedy, idealism, and ultimate triumph. I urge everyone who wants to preserve a glorified view of life, to try to see it.
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