Letty Lynton

Finally back on the big screen after being unavailable for 90 years! Wealthy socialite Letty Lynton is returning to New York, abandoning one-tine lover Emile Renaul in South America, when she strikes up a shipboard romance with Jerry Darrow. Renault is waiting for her in New York and will not leave her alone, so she poisons him. When detectives take her to the D.A.s office, Jerry cooks up an alibi.

Review from Home Theater Forum

Welcome back, Letty Lynton! After more than eighty years of withdrawal from the public eye, the film’s legal issues preventing its widespread showing have now been ended due to the passage of time, and we can all finally see what lies at the center of the controversy. Clarence Brown’s 1932 melodrama emerges as a rather simple romantic triangle narrative. Made in the depths of the Great Depression, Letty Lynton features glamorous foreign locales and oodles of furs and jewels and gowns for viewers of the era to escape from their mundane existences, and, with its being a pre-Code era movie, an ending is allowed that would never have passed muster even two years later.

Joan Crawford had temporarily ditched her rags-to-riches formula with this film playing an heiress from the very beginning and is swathed in a succession of Adrian gowns, furs, and jewels that must have amazed Great Depression audiences no end. (Indeed, one white gown was allowed by MGM to be copied and subsequently sold many thousands of copies to eager ladies anxious to attain some of that MGM glamor.) She seems in the early going a tad artificial in manner and speech in an attempt to give her character some class, but later on when things turn sour, some true emotions seem to materialize ultimately letting her achieve something closer to humanity. Nils Asther may be playing a one-dimensional brutish villain, but he does so with gusto and flair without resorting to hammy, flamboyant gestures or posturing. Robert Montgomery plays his usual genial charmer which by now he had a patent on and makes for an appealing alternative to Asther’s swine. May Robson is a surprisingly cold mother in the early going, but she’s allowed to warm as the picture progresses. Lewis Stone has a wily one-scene cameo as a conniving district attorney trying his best to let one of his suspects incriminate himself or herself as his evidence is a bit on the light side.

Read the rest of the review from Matt Hough here...