Love Letters (USA, 1984) 98 min color DIR-SCR: Amy Holden Jones. PROD: Roger Corman. MUSIC: Ralph Jones. DOP: Alec Hirschfeld. CAST: Jamie Lee Curtis, James Keach, Amy Madigan, Matt Clark. Bud Cort. (New World Pictures)
Say what you will about Slumber Party Massacre. It allowed writer-director Amy Jones to graduate from that one-note drive-in junk to this absorbing character study. Ms. Jones began in the Roger Corman factory, initially as an editor for Hollywood Boulevard, and has since gone on to write Mystic Pizza and several of the Beethoven movies. This is likely the gem in her career.
Jamie Lee Curtis is excellent as radio personality Anna Winter, who begins reading old love letters of her recently deceased mother, and learns that she had been carrying on an extramarital affair for 15 years! Similarly, she begins an affair of her own with a married man (James Keach, also very good). Fresh from her career-making performance in Trading Places (which, granted, took a nude scene to break her out of the scream queen roles), this film seemed to be on every video shelf in the 1980s, using her nude scenes as bait, but truthfully the sex in this film is quite un-erotic, near animal-like, and that is the point. This tale of obsessive love is an intricate study of how one chooses a path of heartbreak and ruin in the hope of finding some physical gratification, which itself leaves one emotionally hollow.
The subplot of Anna facing a career dilemma at the radio station (Bud Cort, also of Corman’s Gas-s-s-s, appears as a loony deejay!) is a clever metaphor of how she must confront her own identity while hungrily persisting in an affair that she knows will lead to no good. While made in the early 1980s, this haunting film is atypical of most things released around the time: its beautifully understated quality is evocative of many of the great 1970s American films. It is full of quiet, powerful economical scenes where nothing more needs to be said or added: simply because a note, a look or a gesture says it all. Amy Jones’ script and direction are near flawless. Even the inevitable confrontation scene where the man’s wife learns of his affair is handled with much maturity and refreshing lack of melodrama.
This superb character-driven story received good reviews in its day, and today it perhaps looks even better- Love Letters is a perfect movie to (re)discover. This was surely one of New World’s finest achievements, made while Roger Corman was winding down operations at this company- still making class entertainment until the end.
Originally published in The Roger Corman Scrapbook.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.