Andrew Sarris

".... But there has been another and much subtler side of her mythic persona that has been neglected, the side on which the hysteria and the histrionics are bottle up beneath a repressive surface of calm and control....

"If I were to pick my favorite Bette Davis performance, it would have to be her Leslie Crosbie in William Wyler's The Letter, particularly her amazingly quiet, tense, sensitive scenes with James Stephenson's gently probing defense counsel, the scenes in which talk dribbles on and on until it is transmuted into the most ringing truth. There are also the sequences in which she does her needlework with such passionate devotion that we come to understand the many dimensions of quiet moments in the lives of all women.... "

Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 
     as reprinted in "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet": The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927-1929 (1998), p. 406-07