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| James Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis in Love Letters |
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, James Keach, Bonnie Bartlett, Matt Clark, Amy Madigan, Bud Cort, Rance Howard. Screenplay: Amy Holden Jones. Cinematography: Alec Hirschfeld. Art direction: Jeannine Oppewall. Film editing: Wendy Greene Bricmont. Music: Ralph Jones.
In Amy Holden Jones's Love Letters Jamie Lee Curtis plays Anna Winter, a woman who discovers a cache of love letters from a man not her father among her dead mother's things and is somehow inspired by them to have an affair with a married man. Curtis does her considerable best with a role that's more concept than character, but Jones's screenplay makes her do a lot of stupid and impulsive things, made more implausible because the man, played by James Keach, doesn't have the charisma that might inspire her to do them. The film is a throwback to the old weepies like Back Street (John M. Stahl, 1932, Robert Stevenson, 1941, and David Miller, 1961), though Curtis's character is given more agency than the women played by Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, and Susan Hayward in those earlier versions, and she doesn't have to die at the end. What psychological depth Jones's film has is enhanced by Anna's relationship with her alcoholic creep of a father (Matt Clark), who seems to have a more than paternal affection for her. The movie also adds some gratuitous nudity, insisted on by its producer, Roger Corman, who backed the filming of Jones's script as a reward for her successful direction of The Slumber Party Massacre (1982).
