Pauline Kael

"The Letter, Bette Davis's forty-third movie, marked her tenth year in films; it is one of her few good vehicles.... The central figure is the wife of a rubber plantation owner--a woman of such unimpeachable respectability that she can empty a gun in her lover and get by with it (in the courts, at least, because in Singapore the white ruling class must stick together.) Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the fury and frustration of a murderess...."

Pauline Kael
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), p. 368-69
5001 Nights at the Movies, p.

Around the time Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was published, Kael wrote that Davis had been, with Katharine Hepburn, one of the "two great heroines of American talkies...." (review of The Lion in Winter, a movie and performance Kael did not like, as she had not liked much of Hepburn's and Davis's then-recent work).