Joan Crawford in... Letty Lynton

This would be your first chance to see one of Joan Crawford’s spicier pre-Code films since 1936, when MGM took the film out of circulation after a legal dispute over the writing credits! Ninety years on, we can finally enjoy this salacious melodrama about a socialite accused of poisoning her ex lover when he threatens to expose their affair just as she’s settled on a better match (the story was inspired by a real life case from Scotland, in 1857, later filmed twice more, as Dishonoured Lady in 1947, and by David Lean as Madeleine, in 1950).

It’s a prime Joan Crawford performance (“I love playing bitches,” she confessed), and no less an authority than costume designer Edith Head said that Adrian’s white organdy gown in this film represented “Hollywood’s single biggest influence on fashion”. Macy’s flooded the market with an imitation that sold more than half a million units and British Vogue reported that “the country was flooded with little Joan Crawfords” with ruffled sleeves and puffed shoulders.

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… [It] 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. 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?

Jim Hemphill, IndieWire