One of Joan Crawford’s Best Movies Is Available for the First Time in 90 Years

When MGM star Joan Crawford put on a spectacular white mousseline de soie gown in her 1932 romance “Letty Lynton,” the look became as iconic as Audrey Hepburn‘s black dress in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress in “The Seven Year Itch,” and Diane Keaton‘s necktie, hat and vest in “Annie Hall.” The outfit created by Gilbert Adrian (whose credit on the film read simply “Gowns by Adrian”) was such an instant hit that Macy’s reported selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 replicas, and gowns with similar ruffled sleeves and puffed shoulders became ubiquitous in department stores for the next several years.

Unlike “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “The Seven Year Itch,” and “Annie Hall,” however, “Letty Lynton” vanished from circulation almost immediately after its initial success and has barely been seen since 1936. The movie has been unavailable thanks to a legal action brought in the 1930s by playwrights Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes, who successfully convinced the court that “Letty Lynton” closely resembled their play “Dishonored Lady.” The copyright dispute sent “Letty Lynton” into the vault, where it remained until the copyright to the Sheldon and Barnes play expired last year.

That expiration removed the legal obstacles that had kept “Letty Lynton” in obscurity, and now Warner Archive has released a stunning Blu-ray of the film taken from a new 4K restoration. That restoration had its big screen premiere a few months ago at the TCM Classic Film Festival, where it’s safe to say virtually everyone in the audience was seeing “Letty Lynton” for the first time. A “new” movie from a major star like Crawford isn’t something you get every day, even at TCM Fest, and it’s even more rare for an unearthed obscurity to be a major work. (Often when a forgotten film from a major star or director resurfaces, there’s a reason it was forgotten.)

But “Letty Lynton” is top tier Crawford, a stylish and funny romp with a dark edge that allows its star to give her talent for histrionic melodrama a real workout. The story of a socialite with a sordid past who falls in love with a fast-talking heir (Robert Montgomery) and is driven to murder to protect her secrets, “Letty Lynton” benefits from squeaking through the system just before the censorious Hays Production Code took effect. The movie would have been unreleasable just a few years later, with so many code violations (from pre-marital sex to suicide and consequence-free murder) that removing them would make the film incomprehensible.

‘Letty Lynton’Everett Collection / Everett Collection

One scene in particular, in which Letty and her loved ones slyly manipulate a District Attorney who knows she’s guilty as sin, is so provocative in its moral implications and so clever in its structure that it makes the viewer aware of just how much was lost by the implementation of the Hays Code. There’s a tendency among classic movie fans to romanticize the restrictions placed on filmmakers by the code; the thinking is that it forced them to find clever ways to get their sexual and violent content across to the audience, and that this made the movies smarter and sexier.

“Letty Lynton” puts the lie to this puritan balderdash, hinting at the hundreds of great movies and thousands of great scenes we probably missed out on thanks to the Hays Code’s suppression. The rules of the code — married couple couldn’t sleep in the same bed, you couldn’t show a gun being fired and the person being hit in the same shot, the law could not be ridiculed, etc. — meant that movies got flattened out and less distinguishable from each other, because they all had to treat subjects like sex, crime, and marriage the same way.

Yes, plenty of great filmmakers made great movies with sharply defined personalities under these restrictions, but how much further could they have gone without them, and how much faster? What’s remarkable about “Letty Lynton” is that it’s unremarkable, in a way; it’s directed by Clarence Brown, not John Ford or Howard Hawks or Sam Fuller, and it’s a smoothly engineered studio product, not an auteurist statement. Yet without the constraints of the code, Brown and screenwriters John Meehan and Wanda Tuchock are able to move freely within the studio-mandated parameters and create idiosyncratic, morally complex, unpredictable characters whose behavior seems to come from within rather than be imposed from the outside by an external list of guidelines.

Montgomery, for example, is simultaneously more likable here than in other films and a little more slippery — it’s his loosest, most relaxed performance, which makes the hints at his dark side all the more effective when they occasionally peek through the surface charm. His romance with Crawford is admittedly a bit unconvincing by modern standards — as was the convention of the day, they seem to fall wildly in love as soon as they say hi to each other — but the connection between the two characters is cleverly constructed by its contrast with the other pairings in the film.

Most of the other relationships in the movie are hopelessly corrupted or poisoned in some way, as Letty moves between an unloving mother and a vengeful former lover, and others whose closeness is a weapon to be feared. The ease of Letty’s romance with Montgomery’s character is positively exhilarating by comparison, and Brown makes the most of the contrast. As the movie progresses, however, the clear lines between healthy and unhealthy, moral and immoral, and self-serving and self-sacrificing begin to blur, to the point that in some scenes we almost start wondering who exactly we’re even supposed to be rooting for — only to be pulled back into Letty’s orbit by Joan Crawford‘s star power.

That star power and the iconic quality of those Adrian gowns are undeniable in the new 4K restoration, which is in keeping with the consistently high quality of work being done by Warner Archive and the studio’s in-house historian and archivist George Feltenstein. The label has been doing some incredibly vital work in recent months, releasing flawless new editions of other classics like the “The Seventh Cross” (the first Hollywood movie to incorporate documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps), the Gene Wilder-Donald Sutherland comedy “Start the Revolution Without Me,” the Spencer Tracy war epic “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” and another Joan Crawford vehicle, “Strange Cargo.”

“Letty Lynton” is perhaps the most significant release of the bunch, given that the only way to see the film before was via muddy bootlegs. The transfer here is as exquisite as any of Warner Archive’s releases, and there are some juicy extras for Crawford fans in the form of original radio broadcasts featuring the star (there’s also a documentary on MGM executive Irving Thalberg). The impeccably preserved sound and image only serve to accentuate just how modern a film “Letty Lynton” was and is; how many movies can be said to justify a 90-year wait?

“Letty Lynton” is now available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive. The 4K restoration will screen at the American Cinematheque‘s Aero Theatre on August 5.