Review of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) by Bob V — 28 Apr 2011

One of the great melodramas of all time, "Letter" is the rather heart-wrenching tale of a young woman's love for a callous philanderer. Though they only actually meet a handful of times, he transforms & taints her life, without giving her much more than a fleeting thought.

Though it plays on a basic level as a straight-up melodrama (but please try to shed the pejorative connotation of the word, the genre has produced many great classics before the nineties made it, and the term itself, something of an insult), deeper down it works as an indictment of the inequalities between men and women at the time. Even though we sympathize (as is intended) with the protagonist's romantic delusions, and can't help but hope that the man she loves will see what's right in front of him, we are continually rebuffed along with our pathetic heroine.