BONUS! Watch a Roger Corman movie to celebrate his 100th birthday!
If you only know director Amy Holden Jones for unleashing Slumber Party Massacre, or if you primarily associate Jamie Lee Curtis with her comedy and horror films, let me introduce you to Love Letters. Financed by Roger Corman under the strict contractual demand for marketable skin (a mandate Jones later admitted led to some admittedly gratuitous nudity), this film quietly subverts its own B-movie DNA. Instead of cheap thrills, Jones crafted a moody, Bergman-esque character study about inheritance, grief and the quiet catastrophes of the heart.
Anna Winter (Curtis), a young public radio DJ in Los Angeles, is already drowning in domestic quicksand. She spends her days catering to the endless, boozy demands of her self-pitying, alcoholic father (Matt Clark). But when her mother (Bonnie Bartlett) passes away, Anna uncovers a hidden archive: a box of passionate, decades-old love letters detailing a 15-year extramarital affair. Rather than judging her mother, Anna develops a strange, romantic fatalism. Armed with the text of a bygone romance read like poetry over the soundtrack, she decides to test the waters herself by falling into a torrid affair with Oliver (James Keach), a sensitive, happily married photographer who warns her right out of the gate that he’s never leaving his wife (Amy Madigan)
For Curtis, Love Letters was a desperate bid to escape the genre pigeonhole that made her a household name. Working for a bargain-bin budget of $25,000, she fought hard for a role executives thought she was too sophisticated, tough or worldly to pull off. It paid off brilliantly. Playing side by side with her comedic tour de force in Trading Places (filmed first, but released in theaters earlier), Curtis proved she could anchor a heavy, internal drama. She captures Anna’s slow descent from casual detachment to a consuming, possessive ache with chilling realism.
Roger Ebert championed the film, praising it as an “investigation into how we can intellectualize our way into situations where our passions are likely to take over.”
Love Letters avoids the cheap moralizing of standard Hollywood soap operas. Instead, it examines the woman standing outside the marriage—not as a mustache-twirling villain or a disposable plot device, but as a human being trying to script a life out of someone else’s echoes. It’s an intelligent, haunting and criminally underseen movie. Plus, you get Bud Cort and Sally Kirkland.
I love the last scene so much, where Curtis meets her mother’s secret suitor at a cemetery. It’s so raw and real.
Also: James and Stacey Keach are real-life brothers and cinematic Eskimo brothers after this.
Jones would go on to direct and write Maid to Order, as well as write Mystic Pizza, Beethoven, The Relic and Indecent Proposal, as well as create Jack’s Place, Black Box and The Resident.
You can watch this on Tubi.
