Throughout the month of February, TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar has offered a variety of fan favorites and familiar classics. On Thursday morning, February 20, a lesser-known Oscar-related gem airs at 6:15am. The Letter stars Jeanne Eagels in the first film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s story. The 1929 drama lacks the star power of the well-crafted remake from 1940, which featured Bette Davis in her prime, but this version has film history on its side. The Letter represents Eagels’ only surviving sound film, and therefore the only record of the acting style that made her a Broadway legend during the 1920s. And, for those intrigued by Oscar trivia, Eagels is the first performer to be posthumously nominated for an Academy Award. While six actors have been posthumously nominated, including James Dean (twice), Spencer Tracy, Peter Finch, Ralph Richardson, Massimo Troisi, and Heath Ledger, Eagels is the only actress to be nominated after death.

JEANNE EAGELS, c. 1921

Largely forgotten today, Jeanne Eagels was renowned in her day because of her natural approach to acting, though contemporary viewers might find her twitching, nervous gestures, and wide-eyed expressions in The Letter broad and obvious. It is important to understand Eagels in context: Dramatic stage acting in the 1920s differed from today’s styles, because it focused more on elocution than emotion.  In other words, it was more important to enunciate lines as a way to give primacy to a play’s literary ambitions or intentions than it was to realistically depict a character.  Eagels, however, played the emotion of a scene, reacting and responding to the other characters or interpreting her character’s state of mind.

In 1922, Eagels became the toast of Broadway when she took on the role of Sadie Thompson in Rain, another play based on a Maugham story. After the Broadway production, she toured in the road company for five years. Her naturalistic approach to her role influenced other actresses, many of whom ended up in Hollywood, including Bette Davis.  Davis idolized the troubled actress, and it is no coincidence that Eagels’ name is mentioned in All About Eve in the scene in which Bette’s character, Margo Channing, is compared with her.

LADY TSEN MEI AS LI-TI

The character of Leslie Crosbie in The Letter was tailor-made for Eagels’ emotive skills.  Set in the British colony of Malaya (near Singapore), the story centers on bored, selfish Leslie, who is the wife of plantation owner Robert Crosbie. Master Crosbie is more interested in his rubber crop than his neglected wife, so Leslie carries on a torrid affair with cad Geoff Hammond. Hammond , however, is intoxicated by a half-Chinese woman named Li-Ti. In a heated argument, Leslie shoots and kills Hammond after he admits he prefers the exotic charms of Li-Ti to her. On trial for murder, Leslie pleads self-defense, alleging that Hammond tried to rape her. She has the jury eating out of her hand until Li-Ti contacts Leslie’s lawyer about an incriminating letter that proves Leslie is lying.

I love the high melodrama of the murder scene, which reveals Eagels’ talent for finding the key emotion of a scene and building on it. Hammond’s cruel admissions fuel Leslie’s escalating agitation until it erupts into violence. A near-hysterical Leslie empties her pistol into Hammond, firing with a series of exaggerated stabbing gestures, which accentuates the violence of the act. In contrast, the next scene finds Leslie coolly spinning her version of events to the jury as she acts the role of innocence violated. Heavy on dialogue, the scene is shot in one long take with no breaks, which is sometimes difficult for movie actors, but stage actress Eagels effectively acts the role of a character who is herself “acting.” Overall, Leslie Crosbie is an unsympathetic character, but Eagels makes her a compelling woman driven by her desires and uncontrolled rage. She deserved her Oscar recognition, though she did not receive an official nomination.  Only winners were announced for the 1928-1929 season, making Mary Pickford the sole actress to receive official recognition that year (for Coquette). However, because Eagels’ name is maintained in the Academy records as among those considered for the best actress award, she is generally regarded as a nominee.

LI-TI’S ESTABLISHMENT, COMPLETE WITH COBRAS, MONGOOSES, AND WOMEN IN CAGES

Eagels was at low point in her career when she signed a three-picture deal with Paramount to appear in talking pictures for their New York studio. Monta Bell worked as the East Coast production head, producing talkies with prominent stage stars in adaptations of well-known plays. Bell snatched up Eagels after she was suspended by Actors Equity in 1928 for 18 months. Eagels had been playing opposite Leslie Howard in Her Cardboard Lover when her problems with alcohol and drugs began to take their toll. In addition to her erratic behavior, which infuriated an unsympathetic Howard, she missed several performances. The latter resulted in her suspension from all stage productions, but it did not prevent her from appearing in films. Eagels’ close associates always disputed the assertion that she took drugs and drank to excess. Clifton Webb, a fellow stage actor and close friend, denied the allegations in his autobiography Sitting Pretty. According to Webb, he and Eagels met in Paris in 1914, almost married in the early 1920s, and regularly attended each other’s performances. He blamed her death on injections for pain administered by her doctor, who turned out to be a quack.  After The Letter, Eagels starred in Jealousy, but she was dismissed from her third feature, The Laughing Lady, because Paramount would not wait for an eye infection to clear. Six months after the release of The Letter, Jeanne Eagels died from a combination of alcohol, chloral hydrate, and heroin. Controversy over the cause of death resulted in three different coroner’s reports, but the mix of drugs and alcohol in her system was not disputed.

LESLIE CROSBIE MAKES HER POINT WITH GEOFF HAMMOND.

In addition to Eagels, a couple other cast members deserve to be mentioned, including a young Herbert Marshall, who makes the most of his brief scenes as smarmy Geoff Hammond. In another interesting tidbit of Oscar trivia, Marshall would play the part of the cuckolded husband in the 1940 version of The Letter. Most fun is the mysterious actress billed as Lady Tsen Mei, who plays the conniving Li-Ti. A singer and actress, Lady Tsen Mei performed in vaudeville, sang opera programs in New York theaters, and acted in silent films, including the 1921 drama Lotus Blossom by Asian director James B. Leong. Though billed as “the First Chinese Screen Star,” Lady Tsen Mei was not really born in China as her publicity claimed. Instead, she was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of a Chinese father and a mulatto mother. She was adopted by a character right out of a movie—a doctor-turned-drug trafficker named Jin Fuey Moy, who had originally christened her Josephine Augusta.

Some have charged that Li-Ti is an example of a negative stereotype, because she epitomizes the Asian woman who lures men to their doom with her exotic sexuality.  Li-Ti runs a den of inequity in Singapore where patrons of all races drink, gamble, and ogle scantily clad dancers. Upstairs, she keeps young girls in cages for the pleasure of older Chinese men; downstairs, men and women bet on a fatal encounter between a mongoose and a cobra—a metaphor for the upcoming showdown between Li-Ti and Leslie. The footage of the fight between the reptile and mammal was borrowed from a German short whose original title has been lost to time. Of course, Li-Ti is not a sympathetic character or positive role model, but neither are any of the white characters.

In truth, The Letter suffers from some of the weaknesses of other early sound films, but Jeanne Eagels—her performance and her life story—makes this drama from back in the day  much more than just an “old movie.”