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The Letter is a 1940 American crime melodrama directed by William Wyler, and starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson. The screenplay by Howard E. Koch is based on the 1927 play of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham derived from his own short story. The play was first filmed in 1929, by director Jean de Limur. The story was inspired by a real-life scandal involving the Eurasian wife of the headmaster of a school in Kuala Lumpur who was convicted in a murder trial after shooting dead a male friend in April 1911. She was pardoned by the local sultan after a public furor.

Plot

Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a British rubber plantation manager in Malaya, shoots dead Geoffrey Hammond, a well-known member of the expatriate community. Leslie tells the servant to send for the new district officer and her husband Robert, who is loading rubber for shipment. Crosbie returns, delivered by his attorney, a close family friend. Leslie claims that she killed Hammond to save her honor.