“Love Letters,” Received Forty Years Too Late

The vast spectrum of streaming platforms is like so many libraries: countless treasures line the shelves but little attention is paid to them. One of the virtues of the Criterion Channel, however, is that its track record of presenting canonical classics and recent masterworks lends instant prominence to its new additions. That’s how, in a roundup of releases coming to the channel, I caught wind of a movie I’d missed when it came out and which Criterion’s programmers have rightly identified as an overlooked gem: “Love Letters,” written and directed by Amy Holden Jones, and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, which had its festival première in 1983 and was released early the following year. “Love Letters” has been streamable elsewhere, but its Criterion Channel showcase, which starts on June 1st, is a fitting tribute to a movie that ought to be considered a small-scale but emotionally potent classic.

Born in 1953, Jones came out of the gate quickly—she made an award-winning student film that inspired Martin Scorsese to hire her as an assistant on “Taxi Driver” (released in 1976). She soon built a successful career as a film editor; Steven Spielberg hired her to edit “E.T.,” but she dropped out when Roger Corman, the famed producer of low-budget genre movies, offered her the chance to direct. The result, a horror film called “The Slumber Party Massacre,” did well enough to give her a foot in the door. Although Corman wasn’t known for producing art films, he had distributed several (including ones by Truffaut and Fellini), and Jones persuaded him that the next film she wanted to make, “Love Letters,” would be in the same vein. He liked her script and, she has said, imposed only one requirement: it had to have some nudity (which is to say, female nudity).

“Love Letters” is a romantic melodrama built on a venerable framework, the eternal triangle, that Jones fills out with a modest but jolting modernism—as much in the form of its story as in the images and tones with which she realizes it. Set in Los Angeles, the film follows Anna Winter (Curtis), a precociously accomplished and popular twenty-two-year-old d.j. at a public-radio station. At the outset, Anna’s mother, Maggie (Bonnie Bartlett), is in the hospital. After Maggie dies, Anna goes through her mother’s belongings and finds a small box of love letters that were written by a man named Joseph in the mid-sixties, when Anna was a child. Though Anna’s parents were unhappily married—her father (Matt Clark) is an alcoholic whose presence she cannot bear—she’d had no idea about this affair. She sneaks the letters back to her own home, on a canal in the Venice neighborhood, and becomes fixated on the story that they reveal—with the passion that Joseph expresses and that her mother clearly shared. She reads the letters obsessively, sometimes aloud to her friend Wendy (Amy Madigan), but more often to herself, with their text spoken aloud on the soundtrack in the voice of Joseph.

At work, Anna meets Oliver Andrews (James Keach), a successful forty-year-old photographer who flirts with her. When they run into each other again she agrees to have a drink with him. He’s up front both about his interest in her and about the fact that he’s married and has children; she unflinchingly embarks on an affair with him. As this relationship develops, Anna, when reading the letters, identifies with Joseph—the other man, as she is the other woman. Dwelling on his anguish at not living with the woman he loves, and knowing of her parents’ unhappiness, Anna resolves to prevent Oliver from making the same mistake that, in her view, her mother made: she will first make Oliver love her and then get him to leave his wife, Edith (Shelby Leverington). As a result, Anna makes every mistake in the book, including turning down a desirable job at a major San Francisco station in order to stay near Oliver, and, as her attachment tightens, her jealousy about his family life (and his unwillingness to abandon it) increases, with dramatic consequences.

The instant, ardent determination with which Anna devours Joseph’s letters and begins her affair with Oliver is the crux both of the story and of its form. From familiar elements of melodrama (the eternal triangle plus a family secret), Jones builds a story of subtly disorienting paradox. The movie’s psychological framework, its system of motivations, is stretched very thin between two extremes: of clarity and opacity, near-obviousness and absolute impenetrability. Joseph’s letters seem both to trigger Anna’s impulsive involvement with Oliver and to guide her through the emotional spectrum and practical implications of the affair. When Anna first meets Oliver, she unequivocally dismisses his brazen flirtation. But their second meeting occurs soon after (perhaps even the day after) her discovery of Joseph’s letters, and now she doesn’t hesitate about accepting his proposition. In a sharp cut from the concert venue where they reconnected, Anna and Oliver are in his car, where he makes clear what Anna will be getting into: “no strings attached.” By contrast, Jones depicts the start of the romantic and sexual relationship with a shivery subtlety—a cut to Anna primping a bed as Oliver, embracing her, declares that he has to go—that harks back to the symbolic sublimity of erotic filmmakers, such as Ernst Lubitsch, of the Hays Code era.

Despite the radical polarity—or, rather, the empty center—on which Anna is built, her character is given unity and continuity by Curtis’s performance. Though Meg Tilly had been the first choice for the role, the casting of Curtis turned out to be inspired. “Love Letters” was Curtis’s first lead role outside of horror films, and she throws herself into it, filling the screen with irrepressible energy and focussed intensity. She gives Anna an alertness and responsiveness that makes the character’s passionately reckless actions all the more poignant for the cool precision with which she reasons herself into them.

Filmmakers who started as editors can be divided into two camps. Some, having mastered how things go together (such as Robert Wise), become consummate professionals (“West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music”). Others, like Don Siegel (“The Killers,” “The Beguiled”), learn what conventions to ignore and become audacious provocateurs. Jones is in the latter category; her direction has a calm yet relentless assertiveness. The scenes give the impression of having been designed for an over-all style of montage that I’d describe as clash cuts. They knock abruptly into one another, and this emotional and visual percussiveness creates a sense of pugnacity and conflict. The choice and composition of shots seem conceived along similar lines. Her images (filmed by the cinematographer Alec Hirschfeld) set the eye on edge, adding a tone of perceptive surprise along with matter-of-fact clarity.

Jones seems to have built the film’s form and tone into the script. “Love Letters” isn’t a film of nuances, of finely traced character traits that explain or motivate behavior; it’s almost entirely a movie of activity, with the characters’ doings thrust at viewers in abrupt, chunk-like scenes. The dialogue is compact and candid to match, turning thought into action with an aphoristic thrust. At one point, Oliver challenges Anna, saying, “You want me to leave my family,” and she responds with a confession that’s also a demand: “No, I want you to want to leave them. I want you to want to leave her because you hate her guts—’cause you love me.” The supporting actors match Curtis’s sharp-edged vigor. In addition to Madigan, as Anna’s best friend, and Clark, as Anna’s father, they include Bud Cort, as a colleague of hers, and Lyman Ward, as Oliver’s friend, an artist who engages him in high-flown intellectual games. The bluntly declarative candor of their performances feels at once tweaked with the artifice of frank expressivity yet emotionally hyperreal. Jones’s combination of taut style and rude reality is detached from the familiar realm of movies; compared with contemporaneous Hollywood films by the greats of the time, such as Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola or Michael Cimino, her world seems like a parallel track of creation, a world of her own yielding an unfamiliar kind of movie that’s incontrovertibly a work of cinema.

“Love Letters” should have propelled Jones to the forefront of the new generation of directors—born in the nineteen-fifties, emerging in the eighties—of whom she was among the first. She followed it up with a script called, yes, “Mystic Pizza”—she’d spent a summer in Mystic, Connecticut, and her experiences there inspired it. It was another story of young women’s lives, but the producer Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., didn’t let her (or any other woman) direct it, and indeed handed it off to two other writers for a rewrite. Jones made a pair of studio genre features, but her career as a personal filmmaker was done. She worked as a screenwriter (co-writing “Beethoven,” with John Hughes) and turned her attention to television. She has had a long and successful career, but “Love Letters” heralded the emergence of a distinctive and vital cinematic voice, which the film industry then stifled, marginalized, and silenced. ♦