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Yar, you be here: The Love Letter > Customer Reviews The Love Letter Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 18 Reviews)Lovely expansion of the original Jack Finney short story
This is another love across time classic in the vein of The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Portrait of Jennie, Somewhere in Time and last and certainly not least Dark Shadows. I mention Dark Shadows specifically because this film was directed by Dan Curtis who was the creator of Dark Shadows. He is a director who understands how compelling and how romantic lovers separated by the distance of yesterday and tomorrow can be for emotional storytelling. As much as this was a Jack Finney story it is classically a Dan Curtis story as well. All the true themes of Dark Shadows are in this movie. The importance of true love, the pain of its unfulfillment, the artifacts that bridge the gap between the lovers, the themes of reincarnation and how people sense their connections when they meet. When Elizabeth meets the man who Scotty had been in a past life, they seem to sense that connection. In true Dan Curtis style loves from the past always look like the people they will be in the future so it was a nice touch when she finally sees Scotty's photo and recognises her soldier. Or when Scotty meets the girl who looks like Elizabeth at the cemetery. It is also quite appealing to see how not just Elizabeth and Scotty's desk bring them together but the house in which Elizabeth lived in was itself a place where the veil of the past and present was very thin. What really helped the story was the reaction of Scotty's 20th Century fiancee to discovering she had lost him to a woman of the 1860's. And to be there and hear the letter pop into the desk and pull it out and see the shock on her face. It's more than her conventional mind can handle and she is the most tragic figure of all. Other classic Dan Curtis touches: the music was by Robert Cobert who did the music for Dark Shadows. It had both the light airy quality and the dramatic sense of the past his music had been for that fabled tv show. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly, but there's a certain look to Curtis's films. I felt like if Scotty had wanted to, he could have driven to Collinsport, Maine and looked up the Collins family. A conversation between Barnabas Collins and Scotty about the nature of love and time would have been quite interesting. Well, to me at least. When I was first taping this movie on CBS, five people called me to make sure I was watching it. Recently, I bought a replacement copy from Amazon which I recieved today. Depends on what you're looking For
The story begins with a man name Scotty, who is out and about one day, and stumbles about an antique desk from the Civil War era. He buys the desk, restores it, makes a neat discovery. There is actually a letter written by the woman, Elizabeth Witcomb, who once owned the drawer, hidden in a secret compartment. He send a response, via an old post office.To his shock, another letter pops up in the desk the next day, and they start a wierd pen pal relationship, and before long, both are in love, despite the time distance. If you are looking for a movie that centers around the Civil War, you'll be disappointed. It's obviously part of the plot, but the story centers around a impossible love. If you're one of those people who picks everything apart, save yourself the trouble, because this movie won't be for you. Overall, I really enjoyed this movie. However, I couldn't give this a total of five stars, for one simple reason. I'm not entirely convinced of the love between Elizabeth and Scotty. It was made clear in the movie that Elizabeth longs for love. It seemed to me she was more in love with love than with Scotty himself, and her enjoyment in his letters seemed little more than desperation on her part for some romance. As for him, he's engaged to get hitched to a woman named Debra, but seems to be getting cold feet. He seems obsessed with Elizabeth, but keeps stringing Debra along. That's not fair to her, and makes me wonder if Scotty, like Elizabeth, is more in love with the idea of loving her than with her as a person. Still, the script was well written, the sets were great, (for a low budget film anyway) and everyone did a great job acting wise. If the courtship via letter hadn't been so rushed I might have been completely convinced that the leads were in love. Unfortunately, I have my doubts. A Nice Story
This is surely a nice film, despite the absolutely fantastic premise of corresponding back in time. I first saw only the last half on the Hallmark Channel and was so enthralled that I bought the DVD so I could enjoy the entire story. It is at the same time both delightful and heartbreaking, and the glorious New England autumn only increases the nostalgia. But back to the story, I never could figure out why he had to mail letters to her, why couldn't he just put them in the desk like she did? Otherwise, I do think this is one of the better movies Hallmark has produced and well worth owning. If you are interested in another book that divides it's time between the Civil War and the present, read "The Lattimer Legend," one of my all time favorites.
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