Top 10 Films About Letters

As The Extraordinary Miss Flower does the rounds of the UK's arthouses, Cinema Paradiso pushes the envelope to explore films that turn around letters.

Once upon a time, an LP whose tracks were linked by a storyline or theme was known as 'a concept album'. This is exactly what Icelandic musician Emilíana Torrini felt moved to record when her producer friend, Zoe Flower, showed her a cache of letters and telexes that she had found following the death of her mother. An Australian who had found herself in London in the 1960s, Geraldine Flower was a free-spirited writer who sparked the ardour of a number of gentleman friends, one of who might well have been a spy.

Combining extracts from the correspondence with imaginative stagings of Torrini's songs, The Extraordinary Miss Flower also employs projected archive footage, stylised décor, and interpretative dance to capture the sights and sounds of the capital in a time of epochal change. Yet, as they did with their Nick Cave documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard also achieve a sense of intimacy, as narrator Sophie Ellis-Bextor laments the decline of the art of letter writing, as it enables us to establish 'a personal, private, permanent connection with another human being', while also creating a memento of 'who we were and who we thought we'd be'.

First Class

Letters have played an important part in screen storytelling since the early silent era. As there was no dialogue, handwritten and printed matter allowed film-makers to convey key information without having to resort to intertitles. In Frank Capra's The Strong Man (1926), for example, the wartime letters exchanged by Harry Langdon and Belgian pen pal Priscilla Bonner establish the bond that will make the audience cheer them on when she comes to America to find him.

In costume dramas, florid penmanship gave the missives a sense of historical authenticity, while typed print introduced a note of formality and threat, particularly in correspondence from official bodies. Letters didn't just convey information, however. They could also provide comic relief by adding a note of levity or they could offer an insight into a character's personality. Messages could also be intercepted and bring jeopardy to a narrative by betraying feelings or plans to the antagonist.

But letters were most often used to reveal emotion, with actors going misty eyed on reading a billet doux in a cutaway before the camera returned to the text. As levels of literacy were not high in the first two decades of the last century, directors often lingered on the contents of letter to allow slow readers to decipher the script and also maybe whisper it to the person sitting with them.

The Irish novelist, Bram Stoker, made copious use of letters in his best-known work, Dracula. It's fascinating to compare the different ways in which the correspondence from Transylvania is utilised in F.W. Murnau's silent classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), and in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). In each case, letters act like the literary equivalent of found footage, whether it's the inquiry that Count Orlok (Max Schreck) sends to the estate agency about the property he wishes to purchase or it's the reports that Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) sends back from the Carpathians to his anxious wife, Mina (Winona Ryder).

There are far fewer epistolary films than there are novels, as the camera is more flexible than the pen in finding ways of conveying information and emotions. But Coppola intriguingly films letters and other printed matter as a silent director would have done by focussing on the page, even when the contents are being read aloud. But, once films began to talk, letters settled into a new role as a plot prompt. In other words, they took the action in a new direction, as was the case with Jean de Limur's 1929 adaptation and William Wyler's 1940 remake of W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter, in which Jeanne Eagels and Bette Davis respectively plays Leslie Crosbie, a bored wife who awaits a reply to the note that she has sent to a lover with a roving eye.

In Frank Capra's Lady For a Day (1933), the letter is sent by a daughter to her mother to announce an imminent visit to New York. However, fruit seller Apple Annie (May Robson) has misled Louise (Jean Parker) into believing that she's the affluent Mrs E. Worthington Manville, who resides at the Hotel Marberry. Fortunately, gangster Dave the Dude (Warren William) intervenes to save the old lady's blushes and Glenn Ford would do much the same for Bette Davis in Capra's remake, Pocketful of Miracles (1961).

Not all screen letters were harmless, however. In Paul L. Stein's Poison Pen (1939), vicar Reginald Tate and his sister, Flora Robson, try to prevent panic from breaking out in a sleepy English village after people start receiving hate mail. Even Tate's daughter, Ann Todd, is denounced and the finger of suspicion points at reclusive seamstress, Catherine Lacey. Rather forgotten these days, this surprisingly dark study of internal division in a country on the verge of war proved a considerable influence (as we shall see) on one of the most notorious French films made during the Occupation.

Two correspondents fall in love without ever having met in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940). However, Budapest shop assistants Alfred (James Stewart) and Klara (Margaret Sullavan) have no idea that their epistolary beloved is a detested work rival and this nifty idea from screenwriter Samson Raphaelson was musicalised for Judy Garland and Van Johnson in Robert Z. Leonard's In the Good Old Summertime (1949) and cannily brought into the Internet age by Nora Ephron in You've Got Mail (1998), which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Letters to and from the front had featured in several films set during the Great War and Noël Coward continued that tradition in In Which We Serve (1942), which he co-directed with David Lean. Post from home is used to trigger flashbacks that show how the crew of HMS Torrin lived before the conflict with the Nazis brought them together to face adversity. This also enabled Coward to convey the propaganda message that the bond between those in uniform and those they are fighting to protect can never be broken by the enemy. Wartime missives also proved crucial to William Dieterle's Love Letters (1945), as Jennifer Jones falls for Robery Scully without realising that the romantic words that had won her heart had actually been penned by his best friend, Joseph Cotten.

It's a shame this isn't currently available on disc in the UK, as too many rights holders have an odd attitude towards releasing what we might term second rank pictures from the Golden Age of Hollywood on disc outside the United States. We at Cinema Paradiso can confidently predict that they would find an audience. So, let's hope that sense eventually prevails.

Luckily, we can bring you three exceptional letter-related melodramas that were produced in the late 1940s. A Stefan Zweig short story provides the inspiration for Max Ophüls's Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), which opens with philandering pianist Louis Jourdan opening a letter which begins with the ominous words, 'By the time you read this I may be dead.' The narrating voice belongs to Joan Fontaine and Ophüls pieces together her life story with empathetic care in a classic example of what was known at the time as 'a woman's picture'. Undervalued on its release, this has developed a reputation over time and was loosely remade by female Chinese director Xu Jinglei in 2004.

Ophüls was on equally good form in The Reckless Moment (1949), a noirish tale of a mother (Joan Bennett) trying to protect her teenage daughter (Geraldine Brooks) after her letters to a dead man (Shepperd Strudwick) fall into the hands of a sinister stranger (James Mason) and his unscrupulous partner (Roy Roberts), who have blackmail in mind. But the most successful of this triumvirate was Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives (1949), a flashbacking puzzle that won the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (for trimming down John Klemperer's novel, A Letter to Five Wives). Celeste Holm went uncredited, but delivers a fine performance as the voice of Addie Ross, who writes to Deborah Bishop (Jeanne Crain), Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell), and Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern) with information pertaining to an affair with one of their husbands (Paul Douglas, Jeffrey Lynn, and Kirk Douglas). It's fiendishly clever, brilliantly played, and utterly compelling. So, what are you waiting for?

There's also much to commend about Tay Garnett's Cause For Alarm! (1951), which sees Loretta Young try to retrieve a damning letter that has been mailed to the district attorney by her husband, Barry Sullivan, who is out for revenge after erroneously becoming convinced that Young had started an affair with his doctor (Bruce Cowling) while he was recovering from a heart attack. By contrast with this 'kitchen noir', the feel-good factor is high in Max Vanel's Fate Takes a Hand (1961), as Post Office worker Ronald Howard insists on hand-delivering five letters that had been left in a mailbag that had been stolen during a robbery 15 years earlier. Journalist Christina Gregg tags along on the lookout for some human interest stories in an engaging Danzigers outing that was scripted by Brian Clemens, the creator of The Avengers (1961-91).

The action sprawls hither and thither in John Huston's The Kremlin Letter (1969), which chronicles the attempts of Patrick O'Neal, a rookie agent with a photographic memory, and fellow spies Nigel Green and George Sanders to recover a document procured by a KGB spy promising the Soviet Union military support in the event of a showdown with China. The Russian connection continues in Ken Russell's The Music Lovers (1971), as gay composer Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) confides by post with Madame von Meck (Izabella Telezynska), while ignoring the impassioned letters written to him by his nymphomaniac wife, Antonina Milyukova (Glenda Jackson). And we're back in the USSR for Chris Bernard's Letter to Brezhnev (1985), in which news of a Scouse night out involving Teresa (Margi Clarke) and Elaine (Alexandra Pigg) and Soviet sailors, Sergei (Alfred Molina) and Peter (Peter Firth), comes to the attention of the First Secretary of the Communist Party.

Perhaps the finest epistolary picture of them all is David Jones's 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), which was based on the book that American author writer Helene Hanff (Anne Bancroft) wrote about her friendship with Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins), a London bookseller who delighted in finding rare editions for his exalted customer. Screenwriter Hugh Whitemore uses the correspondence to explore a changing world over 20 postwar years, while also offering intimate insights of two very different people bound together by a love of words.

Another fine film to demonstrate how letters can bring hearts together is Garry Marshall's Beaches (1988), an adaptation of an Iris Rainer Dart novel that shows how handwritten notes help actress C.C. Bloom (Bette Midler) and lawyer Hillary Whitney (Barbara Hershey) through the vicissitudes of their lives on the opposite coasts of the United States. Trust us, you'll need a plentiful supply of tissues for this one. But you will have to keep your wits about you to follow the machinations of the characters in two films based on the 1782 epistolary novel penned by one-time author, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons (1988), it's John Malkovich whose Vicomte de Valmont needs written proof that he has seduced the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer) before the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) will sleep with him. However, a cache of letters entrusted to the Chevalier Danceny (Keanu Reeves) adds another layer of intrigue. When Miloš Forman revisited the text as Valmont (1989), he cast Colin Firth, Meg Tilly, Annette Bening, and Henry Thomas in the respective roles.

Letters of a sweeter nature are exchanged between Robert De Niro's short-order cook and Jane Fonda's widowed factory worker after she teaches him to read and write in Martin Ritt's Stanley & Iris (1989), which was adapted from Pat Barker's novel, Union Street, by the revered screenwriting team of Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch.

Second Class

Cinema's most fondly remembered prison testimonial was written by Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) in Robert Hamer's Ealing classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). But convicted killer Michael Raine (Bret Michaels) also gets a touch of the memoirs in Marvin Baker's A Letter From Death Row (1998). after he meets the state governor's assistant, Jessica Foster (Lorelei Shellist), who is researching a book about inmates.

We stay behind bars for David Carson's Letters From a Killer (1998). This is a bit of a cheat, as Race Darnell (Patrick Swayze) records taped messages to the four women who had contacted him after he is wrongfully convicted of the murder of his wife. After he is freed, however, the tapes vanish and Darnell finds himself framed for two more killings. Australian actress Gia Carides plays one of the correspondents and we head Down Under for John Ruane's Dead Letter Office (1998), a splendid dark comedy that is overdue a UK disc release, as Miranda Otto and George DelHoyo are splendid in the story of a daughter who takes a job in the post office department that has been returning the letters she had been sending to her absent father.

Another father-daughter bond comes under scrutiny in Josef Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor (1999), as sci-fi thriller in which a letter left in a virtual reality Los Angeles in 1937 holds the key to whether Jane Fuller (Gretchen Moll) can discover if high-tech visionary Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko) murdered project leader, Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl). This neglected picture is based on Daniel F. Galouye's Simulacron-3, which also inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder's World on a Wire (1973). Now there's an irresistible double bill.

The last movie directed by the great Stanley Donen is a charming account of the lifelong friendship between artist Laura Linney and lawyer Steven Weber. However, because Love Letters (1999) was a teleplay, it has not come out on disc over here. Fortunately, Cinema Paradiso users can rent Peter Chan's The Love Letter (1999), which is set in the New England enclave of Loblolly-by-the-Sea and centres on the anonymous blue missive that has bookshop owner Kate Capshaw (in her final film before retirement) wondering whether it's from old friend Tom Selleck or newcomer Tom Everett Scott.

There's no doubting the identity of the correspondent in Alexander Payne's About Schmidt (2002), as the newly retired Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) pours his heart into a series of letters to Ndugu Umbo, the young boy he sponsors in Tanzania, as he strives to make sense of his life and repair his relationship with his estranged daughter. Jonathan Pender plays the recipient of the thrilling letters in Shona Auerbach's Dear Frankie (2004). The nine year-old thinks they have been written by his sailor father. But they are actually the work of his mother, Emily Mortimer, who hasn't had the heart to tell her son the truth and is even considering asking a stranger to help her pull off a well-meaning deception.

Many Cinema Paradiso members are going to know which film we're going to recommend next just by the words, 'My Dearest Allie.' They were written by Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling), who sends 365 unanswered letters to Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams) in Nick Cassavetes's The Notebook (2004), which won the MTV Award for Best Kiss. Need we say more? Much of the action takes place in the 1940s and the same is true for Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, a companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers (both 2006) that reflects on the heroic 40-day rearguard staged by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and his men on a volcanic outcrop in the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War.

If these letters home reveal much about the mindset of those facing certain defeat and imminent death, a note of hope fills the correspondence between Dr Kate Forster and architect Alex Wyler in Alejandro Agresti's The Lake House (2006). They are clearly made for each other. But she's writing from 2006, while he is replying from two years earlier. And Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves thought they had it tough in Jan de Bont's Speed (1994). Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor were also reacquainting after Peyton Reed's Down With Love (2003) when they were cast as Beatrix Potter and Norman Warne in Chris Noonan's Miss Potter (2006), which employs a little quaint animation to make the letters between the author and her publisher that bit more magical. Be warned, however, the letter sent by Norman's sister, Millie (EmilyWatson), is a heartbreaker.

Softening the blow of loss is the theme of Richard LaGravanese's P.S. I Love You (2007), as Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) writes a series of letters while dying of a brain tumour that not only help wife Holly (Hilary Swank) cope with her grief, but also guide her towards a fresh start. The title, of course, comes from a Beatles song and there are plenty more on offer in Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (2007), which has Jude (Jim Sturgess) promise Molly (Lisa Hogg) to write regularly after he leaves Liverpool for New York in the 1960s. After while, however, the letters stop coming.

Coded letters to the San Francisco Chronicle are vital to the plotline of David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), a meticulous procedural investigating one of America's most notorious unsolved cases. Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr. play the paper's cartoonist and crime reporter, while Mark Ruffalo co-stars as Inspector Dave Toschi. A very different true story is told in Jon Amiel's Creation (2009), as Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) receives a long letter from fellow naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, containing ideas that overlap with several of the findings that he had hoped would make his own book, On the Origin of Species, so revolutionary.

At the time this letter arrived in 1858, Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 21 years. As Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria reveals, the monarch (Emily Blunt) and her German cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Rupert Friend), relied heavily on letters during their courtship and early marriage. And Jane Campion similarly highlights the immediacy and intimacy of the lover letters exchanged between poets John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) in Bright Star (both 2009).

The Aussie inflection is more pronounced in Adam Eliot's Mary and Max (2009), a claymation masterpiece that was inspired by the director's own 20-year pen-friendship and turns on the unlikely epistolary bond that forms between eight year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette) from Mount Waverley, Victoria and Max Jerry Horowitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome, whose name was chosen at random out of a phone book. Interestingly, letters also prove vital to Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook), when she is separated from her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), in Eliot's follow-up, Memoir of a Snail (2024), which will hopefully make it to disc over here some time soon.

Mary and Max never meet, but it's love at first sight for soldier John Tyree (Channing Tatum) and college student Savannah Lynn Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) in Lasse Hallström's Dear John (2010). Active duty keeps them apart for the next seven years, however, and pens and ink regularly have to be deployed in this poignant adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks bestseller. Seyfried found herself involved in more letter writing later the same year in Gary Winick's Letters to Juliet, as New Yorker fact-checker, Sophie Hall, travels to Verona and is so inspired by the Secretaries of Juliet, who respond to the lovelorn requests for advice posted on the wall of the Capulet courtyard, that she decides to respond to Claire Smith (Vanessa Redgrave), who had asked for help in finding her beloved back in the 1950s.

Coming right up to date, we're going to blame the title for a little rule-bending, as the menacing missives in Dean Taylor's Chain Letter land in online mailboxes rather than on any front door mats. However, many Cinema Paradiso users will remember receiving this kind of correspondence threatening dire consequences unless it's passed on to five new recipients. We should warn you about the shocking opening scene, however, while also pointing out (even though it's not currently available) the potentially distressing storyline in David Nixon's Letters to God (both 2010), as an eight year-old boy (Tanner Maguire) bravely fighting terminal cancer starts writing letters to Jesus, which touch the hearts of the entire community, including a substitute postman with a troubled life.

Sticks and stones represent the attempts to communicate with a forestry official made by a Sasquatch in Christopher Münch's Letters From the Big Man (2011) and the exchanges are equally unique in Spike Jonze's Her (2013), as Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who works in a futuristic Los Angeles for beautifullyhandwrittenletters. com, forges a connection with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent operating system that has been designed to evolve in line with user interactions. We'll meet other designer letter writers later in our survey, but this five-time Oscar-nominated drama leaves an indelible impression.

Three letters shape the action in Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans (2016), an adaptation of M.L. Stedman's acclaimed novel that sees Great War veteran Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) become a lighthouse keeper off the Western Australian coast. After marrying Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) after a lengthy correspondence, Tom proposes. But his guilty conscience prompts him to send an anonymous letter to Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz) to reassure her that the daughter she believes to have been lost at sea is being well cared for. A tragedy involving another daughter leaves advertising executive Howard Inlet (Will Smith) in a deep depression. But he starts writing letters to Love, Time, and Death in David Frankel's Collateral Beauty (2016) and his colleagues hire actors Brigitte (Helen Mirren), Amy (Keira Knightley), and Raffi (Jacob Latimore) in an effort to jolt him into confronting his new reality.

Mental health issues also come under scrutiny in Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's hand-painted labour of love, Loving Vincent (2017), which sees postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd) seek to deliver the last letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk) to the widow of his art dealer brother, Theo (Cezary Lukaszewicz). Heartfelt missives that were never supposed to be mailed find their way to their destination in Susan Johnson's To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018), as Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) discovers that all her exes have learned about her feelings for them. This romcom was followed by the sequels, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2015) and To All the Boys: Always and Forever (2017).

Reflections on the past are also to the fore in Xavier Dolan's The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2018), as actor Rupert Turner (Ben Schnetzer) publishes a book of the letters he exchanged with John F. Donovan (Kit Harrington), the star of Hellsome High, the TV show that had kept him sane during a difficult childhood with his abusive mother, Sam (Natalie Portman). The correspondence is more hopeful in Kealan O'Rourke's The Christmas Letter (2019), a CGI-animated short narrated by Kate Winslet that chronicles a young boy's determination to restore joy to the life of the tetchy Mrs Broom (Fiona Shaw).

Played by Ben Platt, the eponymous anti-hero of Stephen Chbosky's Dear Evan Hansen (2021) is advised to write letters to himself in order to overcome his social anxiety disorder. However, one gets into the hands of his dream girl's brother and things become complicated when he commits suicide in this big-screen adaptation of the Benj Pasek and Justin Paul musical that earned Tony and Grammy Awards during its Broadway run. Another misplaced missive proves key to Augustine Frizzell's The Last Letter From Your Lover (2021), a reworking of the Jojo Moyes bestseller that follows journalist Ellie Haworth (Felicity Jones) in her bid to discover more about Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley) and her 1960s romance with a man named only in the text as 'Boot'.

Thea Sharrock's Wicked Little Letters (2023) takes us even further back in time, as the pious Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) becomes the latest resident of 1920s Littlehampton to receive a poison pen letter. It's presumed the culprit is Irish single mother, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). But WPC Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) has her doubts.

Par Avion

Loyalties were divided in Occupied France and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau (1943) chillingly captures the atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust, as a hate mail campaign escalates in the small provincial town of St Robin after Dr Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay) is initially targeted. Condemned on all sides during the war, this gripping thriller earned Clouzot a lifetime ban from directing that was rescinded in 1947. Four years later, Otto Preminger remade the film in Hollywood as The 13th Letter (1951).

Type the name Kinuyo Tanaka into the Cinema Paradiso searchline and you will discover some of the masterworks of Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. However, no one has thought to release the actress's directorial debut, Love Letter (1953), which is disappointing, as Masayuki Mori is superb as the broken-spirited soldier who writes to the occupying American GIs on behalf of lovesick women, even though his own heart was shattered by a Dear John letter during the war. Released the same year was Raja Nawathe's Bollywood classic, Aah, which sees Neelu (Nargis) respond to the letter from engineer and aspiring poet Raj (Raj Kapoor) after it has been discarded by her older sister, Chandra (Vijaylaxmi). A romantic correspondence ensues. But cruel fate intervenes.

A decade later, Kapoor used unsigned letters to add a complication to the already intricate action in Sangam (1964), in which he also plays Sunder, a disappointed suitor who goes off to become a pilot without realising that his beloved, Radha (Vyjayantimala), is deeply in love with Gopal (Rajendra Kumar), the best friend he had asked to watch over her while he was away. A military man proves a central figure in François Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975), as Adèle Hugo (Isabelle Adjani) travels to Nova Scotia to deliver a love letter to Lieutenant Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson), only for him to spurn her. The lovesick Adèle's identity remains a mystery until a letter arrives from her famous father in France, Victor Hugo.

A damning indictment is smuggled out of the convent of Serreda Iris at the height of the Inquisition, when reluctant novice, Maria (Susan Hemingway), discovers that Mother Alma (Ana Zanatti) is a Satanist who allows the monks to perform black masses in the chapel in Jesús Franco's nunsploitation classic, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1976). Markedly more poignant is 'The Other Son', one of the five Luigi Pirandello vignettes in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Kaos (1984), which centres on an elderly peasant woman (Margarita Lozano) pleading with those sailing for America to carry letters to the sons who have not written to her since emigrating years earlier.

Although there is little chance that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Letters From the Park (1988) will ever come to disc, we couldn't resist telling you about a story set in Cuba in 1913 that involves a professional penman, Don Pedro (Víctor Laplace), who falls for Maria (Ivonne Lopez) after she hires him to send poetic missives to a hot air balloonist named Juan (Miguel Paneque). Now who wouldn't want to see that? It's certainly more uplifting than Michael Haneke's shocking debut feature, The Seventh Continent (1989), whose three parts all open with a letter being read aloud on the soundtrack. A final note is left taped to the wall after Austrian family man, Georg (Dieter Berner), announces that he is emigrating to Australia with wife Anna (Birgit Doll) and their daughter, Eva (Leni Tanzer).

Too timid to declare his love because of his large nose, Cyrano (an Oscar-nominated Gérard Depardieu) agrees to the request of Roxane (Anne Brochet) to write enchanting billets doux to the dashing, but vacuous Christian (Vincent Perez), who is unworthy of her love. Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) is the pick of the various adaptations of Edmond Rostand's 1897 play, but Cinema Paradiso users can also see how the Oscar-winning José Ferrer ( Cyrano de Bergerac, 1950), Steve Martin ( Roxanne, 1987), and Peter Dinklage ( Cyrano, 2021) got on in the role.

In a letter to his wife, antique dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) describes the strange changes he is experiencing after taking possession, in Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos (1992), of a mechanical beetle that had once belonged to a notorious 16th-century alchemist. This allegory on US-Mexican relations makes for compelling viewing, but the focus falls on Italo-Chilean dealings in Michael Radford's BAFTA- and Oscar-winning gem, Il Postino (1994), as temporary postman, Mario Ruoppola (Massimo Troisi), delivers the mail to exiled poet, Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret). The pair forge a friendship, but Mario is disappointed when he fails to receive a reply to the heartfelt letter he sends to thank Neruda for his help in winning the heart of his new wife, Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta).

Sticking with the Latin American theme, Walter Salles's Central Station (1998) earned Fernanda Montenegro an Oscar nomination for her performance as Dora, an embittered former schoolteacher who has such contempt for the illiterate people who ask her to write letters while passing though Rio de Janeiro's main railway station that she frequently fails to post their messages and sometimes even tears them up. However, her heart softens when she finds herself caring for a seven year-old orphan named Joshué (Vinícius de Oliveira).

While languishing in a Cuban prison, poet and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem) writes letters home for his fellow inmates in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000). Despite its title, Manoel de Oliveira's La Lettre (1999) keeps us waiting for the words on a page, as Madame de Clèves (Chiara Mastroianni) confides in her nun friend (Leonor Silveira) that she has lost her heart to singer Pedro Abrunhosa (Pedro Abrunhosa), despite being married to a doctor who adores her. When the letters sent by a Georgian doctor working in Paris stop coming, sister Marina (Nino Khomasuride) and her twentysomething daughter, Ada (Dinara Drukarova), start forging them to prevent his 90 year-old mother, Eka (Esther Gorintin), from discovering that he was killed in a construction site accident in Julie Berticcelli's Since Otar Left (2003).

A message in a bottle coaxes Bu (Shi Qi) to leave her Taiwanese fishing village and travel to Hong Kong in Vincent Kok's Gorgeous (1999). However, she quickly gives up on sender Albert (Tony Leung) to hook up with businessman CN Chan (Jackie Chan). But he's facing a martial arts showdown with a fighter hired by a deadly rival. Another small seaside community provides the backdrop for Hiroyuki Okiura's A Letter to Momo (2011), a delightful anime in which a young Japanese girl moves to a new house with her mother and is helped by a trio of mischevous Yokai monsters (who are invisible to everyone but Momo) to discover what her father had been going to say in the letter that he had left uncompleted at his death.

A woman mourning the loss of her fiancé in a climbing accident gets a surprise in Shunji Iwai's Love Letter (1995), when she receives a reply to the note she had sent to his childhood address from a stranger with the same name (pop star Miho Nakayama in a dual role) who had known her loved one at school. Clearly, Iwai is intrigued by epistolary stories, as he made Chinese (2018) and Japanese (2021) versions of his own novel, Last Letter, in which a woman attends a school reunion in the guise of her late sister and sparks a correspondence with her sibling's old boyfriend.

There's also a school connection in Kapon Thongphlap's The Letters of Death (2006), as a spate of untimely demises prompts two Thai friends to investigate the origin of the letters each of the victims had received. A true story underlies the action in Paolo Sorrentino's Vincere (2009), as Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) really did write letters to the pope and the king in an effort to force Benito Mussolini into acknowledging that he is the father of her child. Staying in Italy, secret service agent Toni Servillo seeks to salvage his career in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza's Sicilian Letters (2024) by entering into an incriminating correspondence with Elio Germano, who is the last known Cosa Nostra boss in Sicily at the turn of the millennium.

While this isn't yet available on disc, Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache's Untouchable (2011) certainly is. Since suffering a paragliding accident, wealthy quadriplegic Philippe (François Cluzet) has been corresponding with Eléonore (Dorothée Brière), who lives in Dunkirk. Carer Driss (Omar Sy) persuades his employer that he has nothing to fear from meeting her in person. Becoming close to someone known solely from letters is also the subject of Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox (2013). This BAFTA-nominated drama is an absolute delight that turns on a mix-up at the delivery service that picks up tiffin tins from homes and restaurants and take them to work places. Housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) realises there's been a mistake when accountant Saajan (Irrfan Khan) receives the meal instead of her husband. But his reply to the note she had packed with the lunch proves the start of a beautiful friendship.

Registered

The General Post Office played such a key role in British life in the 1930s that it had its own film arm. Led by John Grierson, the so-called 'Father of the Documentary' who had fulfilled a similar brief at the Empire Marketing Board, the GPO Film Unit not only produced shorts informing the public of how the postal system worked, but also reminders about posting early for Christmas and insights into how the new telephone network would operate.

Easily the most famous title was Harry Watt's and Basil Wright's Night Mail (1936), which boasted music by Benjamin Britten and verses by W. H. Auden. Half a century later, Bob Franklin directed Night Mail II (1987) to show how things had changed under Royal Mail. With the service currently facing competition from couriers and bad press as a result of the events chronicled in James Strong's BAFTA-winning Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024), one would think that a second sequel might be in order.

Before the Ministry of Information started to co-ordinate wartime propaganda through the Crown Film Unit in 1941, directors of the calibre of Humphrey Jennings, Richard Massingham, Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Hasse, and Stuart Legg made films for the GPO, while animators Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and Lotte Reiniger also accepted commissions. The pick of their output, including Jennings and Watt's Oscar-nominated classic, London Can Take It (1940), can be found among the 50-odd titles curated in the three excellent BFI compilations, Addressing the Nation (2008), We Live in Two Worlds, and If War Should Come (both 2009).

A clutch of documentaries have used letters to personalise the subject matter. No one did it more deftly or disconcertingly than Chantal Akerman in News From Home (1976), as she reads extracts from the letters sent by her loving, but manipulative mother back in Belgium over long takes of quotidian life in New York. The Vietnam War had only just ended when Akerman left Brussels, but it took a decade before audiences were confronted with one of the most poignant films made about the deeply divisive conflict. In Bill Couturié's Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam (1987), the words written by service personnel are read by actors of the calibre of Willem Dafoe, Robert De Niro, Robert Downey, Jr., Michael J. Fox, Harvey Keitel, Ellen Burstyn, Elizabeth McGovern, and Sean Penn.

Julie Christie and Marianne Faithfull provide the narration in Bruce Weber's A Letter to True (2004), a ciné-essay that reflects on the photographer-cum-film-maker's love of animals and the anguish he feels each time he goes on assignment of having to leave behind his partner and their dogs. The depth of feeling is markedly greater in Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary (2008), a video letter to the son of the director's best friend, Dr Andrew Bagby, who was murdered in a Pennsylvania parking lot in November 2001. Girlfriend suspect, Shirley Turner, discovered she was pregnant after she had fled to Canada and she was awarded custody of her son over grandparents David and Kathleen Bagby after she was granted bail. The film aims to give Zachary a memento of the father he had never known.

The letters shared by mountaineer George Mallory and his wife Ruth enable climbers Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding to piece together a definitive account of the 1924 Everest expedition in Anthony Geffen's The Wildest Dream (2010), which makes use of restored footage, dramatic reconstructions, and previously unseen photographs in an effort to solve a mystery. Equally intrepid was Gertrude Bell, whose remarkable life is chronicled in Sabine Krayenbühl's Letters From Baghdad (2016), which draws on private diaries, official documents, and voluminous correspondence to show how this explorer, spy, and political strategist became known as 'the female Lawrence of Arabia'.

Poste Restante

So far, we have concentrated on films in which letters are crucial to the plot. But we'll close with a section on those pictures in which they play a passing part, such as the missives that Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) urges Dr Watson (Nigel Bruce) to send him from Dartmoor in Sidney Lanfield's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939). Similarly, in Anatole Litvak's All This, and Heaven Too (1940), the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer) is so furious with his envious wife (Barbara O'Neil) for threatening to give beloved governess Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Bette Davis) a bad letter of recommendation that he lets his temper get the better of him.

Jane Austen knew a thing or two about using letters to advance the plot. In Robert Z. Leonard's Pride and Prejudice (1940), envelopes from Mr Collins (Melville Cooper), Mr Darcy (Laurence Olivier), and Jane Bennet (Maureen O'Sullivan) all cause a commotion at Longbourn. Indeed, they have a similar effect in Simon Longton's 1995 mini-series and Joe Wright's 2005 big-screen adaptation. Darcy (Sam Riley) also has some explaining to do by mail after a ravenous infestation is unleashed in Burr Steers's take on Seth Grahame-Smith's tome, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016).

A couple of episodes also occur in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995), as Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) writes to a man on her own initiative and sister Elinor (Emma Thompson) is dismayed when her mother receives a letter from Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) and she does not. We should also note that Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship (2016) was based on Austen's epistolary novel, Lady Susan. Patricia Rozema used some of her letters and juvenilia to enliven her interpretation of Mansfield Park (1999), which sees Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor) accept a proposal from Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola) after receiving an unencouraging letter from Edmund Bertram (Jonny Lee Miller).

Back in the 1940s, delays in securing some letters of transit leave Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) to relive old times in Paris in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942). However, Rick doesn't have particularly fond memories of the message he received from Isla during a railway station downpour that smudged the ink before he hurled the screwed up paper at the tracks. Letters also crop up in Curtiz's festive favourite, White Christmas (1954), as an army buddy writes to double act Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) asking them to check out his singing sisters, Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy Haynes (Vera-Ellen). A tear-jerking letter from the older sibling almost ruins the Yuletide atmosphere and, speaking of the holiday season, the US Postal Service delivers a sackful of letters to Santa in order to help Kris Kringle (the Oscar-winning Edmund Gwenn) win a court case in George Seaton's Miracle on 34th Street (1947).

Back in the war, art dealer Paul Lukas returns to Germany and becomes so involved with the Nazi Party that he stops writing to Morris Carnovsky, his Jewish partner in New York in William Cameron Menzies's Address Unknown (1944). In order to keep up the pretence that he is a British officer, Captain Karel Hasek (Michael Redgrave), a Czech fugitive from Dachau, writes letters to the dead man's wife, Celia Mitchell (Rachel Kempson), in Basil Dearden's The Captive Heart (1946).

A teenager sends a photograph of mother Eleanor Parker while corresponding with a soldier and gets a shock when Forrest Tucker turns up on her doorstep in James V. Kern's Never Say Goodbye (1946) because she has been trying to coax her mother into patching things up with her roguish father, Errol Flynn. A similar scenario surfaces in William D. Russell's Dear Ruth (1947), as Joan Caulfield discovers that kid sister Mona Freeman has been pen-palling with Air Force Lieutenant William Holden, who turns up on furlough with romance in mind. While Cinema Paradiso has this fun film for rental, we can't lay our hands on the elusive sequels, Dear Wife (1949) and Dear Brat (1951).

In Jules Dassin's A Letter For Evie (1946), Marsha Hunt and Hume Cronyn become pen pals after he finds a note tucked into his new shirt. The love letters exchanged between two famous poets are pursued by an ambitious publisher in Martin Gabel's The Lost Moment (1947), an adaptation of Henry James's The Aspern Papers, which was filmed under its original title by Julien Landais in 2018, with Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson as the elderly recipient of the billets doux and her pianist niece.

Robert Cummings played the letter-hunting publisher in 1947 and a stolen note that he sent to Grace Kelly spells trouble in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder (1954), as it has fallen into the hands of jealous husband Ray Milland, who has devised a fiendish way to exact his revenge. A decade later, London is also the setting for Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins (1964), which sees the letter written by Jane and Michael Banks (Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber) outlining their requirements for a new nanny magically repair itself after being torn up by their grumpy banker father (David Tomlinson). And we all know who applies for the vacancy.

Young Leo Colston (Dominic Guard) plays an unwitting postman in running messages between Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and tenant farmer Ted Burgess (Alan Bates) in Joseph Losey's adaptation of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1971). Letters received by Tess Durbeyfield (Nastassja Kinski) from both lord of the manor Alec d'Urberville (Leigh Lawson) and farmer Angel Clare (Peter Firth) play crucial roles in determining her fate in Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), which was inspired by a novel by Thomas Hardy. The letters that Celie Harris (Whoopi Goldberg) writes to God and her sister, Nettie (Akosua Busia), are read aloud as voiceovers in Steven Spielberg's take on Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1985).

A consignment of saucy postcards is delivered to the bank where Ronnie Corbett works and he has to keep them hidden from anti-smut campaigning boss, Arthur Lowe, in Cliff Owen's No Sex Please, We're British (1973). In stark contrast, high school buddies Lance (Anthony Edwards) and Walter (John Cusack) write regularly after they go to different colleges in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing (1985), while super fan Eddie 'Ragman' Weinbauer (Marc Price) comes to wish he hadn't sent fan mail to rocker Sammi Curr (Tony Fields) in Charles Martin Smith's Trick or Treat (1986), as he starts using it against the teenager from beyond the grave.

Even though many Cinema Paradiso users will have already seen Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption (1994), we won't spoil this adaptation of a Stephen King story. But we will say that there'es a great moment when Ellis Boyd Redding (Morgan Freeman) finds a letter from cellmate Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins). Young Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews) writes daily to her father when she's sent from India to a strict all-girls boarding school in New York in Alfonso Cuarón's reworking of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess (1995). However, her life takes a turn for the worse after Captain Richard Crewe (Liam Cunningham) is presumed killed in the Great War. Unaware that the auditioning Thomas Kent is Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) in disguise, William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) writes a letter offering him a place in his theatre troupe in John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

When Theresa Osborne (Robin Wright) finds a typed letter in a bottle on the sand in Cape Cod, she becomes obsessed with tracking down the writer and travels to California to meet boat builder Garrett Blake (Kevin Costner) in Luis Mandoki's Message in a Bottle (1999). While this is a sob story, John Frankenheimer's Deception (aka Reindeer Games, 2000) is a pugnacious thriller, in which jailbird Rudy (Ben Affleck) comes to regret pretending to be his cellmate in order to seduce his pen pal, as Ashley (Charlize Theron) is in cahoots with her crooked brother, Gabriel (Gary Sinise), who coerces Rudy into taking part in an armed robbery.

A couple of anonymous notes make life awkward for the newcomer (Monica Bellucci) to an insular Sicilian town in Giuseppe Tornatore's Malena (2000). Also set during the Second World War, Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002) sees musician Wladyslaw Szpilman (Oscar winner Adrien Brody) receive family news in a series of letters that dry up when the restrictions imposed upon the Jews in Poland become more stringent following the opening of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Grizzled coach Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) sends a letter to his daughter (which is read out by buddy Eddie Dupris [Morgan Freeman]) explaining his actions in relation to promising female boxer, Maggie Fitzgerald (the Oscar-winning Hilary Swank) in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004). A letter that was never meant to be seen causes a rift between Celia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) in Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan's Booker Prize-winning novel, Atonement. More discovered correspondence spells disaster for Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) in the 19th-century Colombian river port of Cartagena in Mike Newell's version of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (both 2007).

Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is crushed by the letter informing her that the cookbook she has spent a decade compiling will not be publshed in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (2009), which also shows how blogger Julie Powell (Amy Adams) follows all 524 recipes in her cookery bible. Lonely at school and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Charlie Kelmeckis (Logan Lerman) writes letters to an anonymous friend in an effort to help himself cope in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Missives written between 1849 and 2321 are read aloud to explore the inter-connectedness of souls in Tom Tykwer's take on David Mitchell's bestseller, Cloud Atlas (both 2012).

Fearing he is not going to return from a solo yacht voyage after a collision in the Indian Ocean, Robert Redford writes letters to say goodbye to all the people he is going to miss in J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost (2013). While investigating the case for sainthood, Vatican priest, Father Celeste van Exem (Max von Sydow), studies the correspondence written during the last 40 years of her life by Mother Teresa of Kolkata (Juliet Stevenson) in William Riead's biopic, Letters From Mother Teresa (2014), which is also known as The Letters and Water Street.

Gnawed by curiosity, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) climbs into the loft to discover the contents of an official letter received by her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) in Andrew Haigh's 45 Years (2015). Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is even more taken aback in Atom Egoyan's Remember (2015), when a letter from his old friend Max (Martin Landau) explains that the stash of banknotes in the package he has just received is to fund their bid to find and punish the sadistic guard who had persecuted them in Auschwitz.

Despite giving him a letter signed by Rudolph Valentino, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) can't persuade lover Phil (Steve Carell) to divorce his wife in Woody Allen's Café Society (2016), which is set in 1930s Hollywood. Famed for her writings on Katharine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead, Lee Israel turned to forging letters by famous authors when her career stalled and Melissa McCarthy earned an Oscar nomination for playing her in Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).

While slowly dying of cancer, Police Chief Willoughy (Woody Harrelson) writes several poignant letters in Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, with the most affecting being addressed to his wife, Anne (Abbie Cornish), and to Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who has been highly critical of his conduct of her daughter's murder case. The charge is less serious, but a young bear from Peru goes on trial in Paul King's Paddington 2 (both 2017) and he writes home to tell his Aunt Lucy all about it.

The misgivings of a soldier on the Western Front are revealed in the letter that Lieutenant Osborne (Toby Jones) writes to his sister, Margaret, in Saul Dibb's take on Journey's End (2017), the R.C. Sheriff play that had previously been filmed by James Whale in 1930. Shortly after the Second World War, writer Juliet Ashton (Julia James) exchanges letters with Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman) and learns about the ways in which his friends defied the Nazis during the occupation of the Channel Islands in Mike Newell's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018), which was based on a bestseller by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

A chocolate stain characterises the letter that young orphan, Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro), receives from his Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black), which sparks the race against time in Eli Roth's The House With a Clock in Its Walls (2018), which demonstrates that words on a page can be just as exciting in filmic terms as the texts, emails, and social media posts that dominate communication a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Having bested the evil Dr Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong) in David F. Sandberg's Shazam! (2019), 14 year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) - who has the power to turn into a superhero (Zachary Levi) on the utterance of one word - needs to compose a letter in Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) in order to convince Hespera (Helen Mirren) to release his physically disabled foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Glazer).

Just as we know that Lynne Ramsay decided to dispense with the letters in adapting Lionel Shriver's bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), we also know that there are dozens of other films in which letters play some role or other. We simply didn't have time to round them all up, hence we're only listing titles like Andrew L. Stone's Never Put It in Writing (1964), Henry Koster's Dear Brigitte (1965), Alvin Rakoff's Dirty Tricks (1980), David Greenwalt's Secret Admirer (1985), and Alfonso Arandia's The Anonymous Letter (1990). But do drop us a line to let us know which ones we have omitted and which are your favourite letter films.