Liberating "Letty Lynton"

On May 1, 2026, a restoration of Letty Lynton premiered at the TCM Film Festival. The film hadn’t screened publicly for 90 years, due to a plagiarism lawsuit and some very silly, poorly executed censorship from the Hays Office. Check out my latest video above for that whole story!

During its decades locked away in the Warner Bros. archive, Letty Lynton became a white whale of sorts for many classic film fans who were dying to check a “lost” Joan Crawford film off their watch lists and knew the studio had a print but couldn’t legally do anything with it. Thanks to the diligent work of archivists and historians like George Feltenstein, Letty Lynton finally reappeared, offering new glimpses of an actress mid-metamorphosis, shifting from the vibrant ‘dancing daughter’ of the late 1920s to the glamorous embodiment of 1930s stardom.

As film critic Philip Scheuer wrote in his 1932 review of the film in The Los Angeles Times, “[Crawford] has arrived where she wanted to go; she is, miraculously, a different person. To me she is now almost wholly unreal. I do not say this disparagingly, because the screen itself is unreal in the abstract sense, and Miss Crawford has simply become an abstraction. It is up to us to readjust our values in regarding her. She is enough of an actress to express what she feels, and this new, undeniable glamour…does the rest. Letty Lynton is her picture.”

On the occasion of the film’s liberation from copyright jail, I spoke with Casey LaLonde, Crawford’s grandson, about his experience bringing this film back to the big screen and seeing it for the first time with an audience. We even tried to settle that infamous birth year debate.

Enjoy!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Be Kind Rewind: I’d love to just start by talking about your involvement with the estate, how you came to be running it, and how you see your role in keeping the memory of Joan alive.

Casey LaLonde: Sure. So, my mother is Cathy [Crawford LaLonde]. She was one of the two fraternal twins with her sister Cindy. I’ve asked this legal question a ton of times to attorneys and throughout the years—there’s literally nobody left. It’s my sister and me. My mother passed away in 2020. So lawyer upon lawyer has said, “Yep, as long as you are the heir of your mother, and she was the heir of Joan, sure.” And there’s no one to contest it.

So I’ve been very active since about 2006, just going out and speaking to fans and presenting her home movies. I reissued both of her books that were out of print, My Way of Life and A Portrait of Joan, back in 2017. Over the years, I’ve just become the voice for her and the voice of the estate, in Hollywood and wherever it takes us.

BKR: So that must have been a learning process, too, because to a certain extent you also have to become an authority on her. That’s very different from just growing up with somebody and getting to know them personally. Was that a difficult process for you? Having to dig into this history in a different way?

CL: Yeah. Not overnight, but I had to become that authority of all of her movies, her co-stars, her general history, her work with Pepsi, her charitable work through the decades, her extended family, everybody. So I do research almost every day. I learn new things every day about my grandmother, because it’s a lifetime of learning. From 1925 forward and Hollywood, but then her childhood—growing up in, being born in San Antonio in 1906—

BKR: You’re committing to 1906?

CL: I’m going with 1906.

BKR: Okay!

CL: I’ll go there quickly. Scott Eyman’s book that was published in November of last year—I actually met him on the TCM cruise back in like 2012. He called me up, maybe 30 months ago, just out of the blue. And he had just finished Chaplin [Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided (2023)], and he said, “Case, I’m thinking of doing a book about your grandmother.”

And of course, what am I gonna say? “Don’t do it?” Of course you’re gonna do it! He’s a noted, wonderful biographer. He’s got a great reputation. So he went to his publisher, Simon and Schuster, they gave him an immediate green light to go ahead, and I provided him access to every single document I had, all the photos I have, the three and a half hours of home movies that I have, and just about every scrap of paper that I have in my possession.

On the side, I kind of did a little research. He’s got his own researcher, but I jumped in, I got a Newspapers.com subscription, because there’s stuff I just don’t know. It was really my minutiae that he wanted to learn about. So I spent months just gathering more information.

Here’s one interesting thing about 1906. Texas law back then—1908 was the first year that they required birth certificates for all Texans moving forward. If you were born at home without a doctor’s care before 1908, you did not need a birth certificate. None was issued unless you asked for it.

Given Anna Bell Johnson’s, my great-grandmother’s, poverty, she had Joan at home and did not seek a doctor’s help. So she never had a birth certificate. At Scott’s request, as the next of kin, I put in records requests all over Texas to see if, if she maybe was not born in San Antonio. Maybe she was born in San Angelo or some other, near nearby town or, or city.

Nothing. I got “no records found” from many places. So we still think she was born in San Antonio, but given her brother Hal’s birthdate, we’re still looking at 1906 as her birth year.

BKR: Yeah. I did read his [Scott Eyman’s] book, and I think he found some other sort of document, school admissions, or something like that, right?

CL: Yes. She notes 1906 as the date. Absolutely. Knocking two, even two years—

BKR: Two years makes a difference. “Are you 28 or 30?”

CL: Exactly! So she knocked it down by two years.

BKR: Harmless.

CL: Exactly. Absolutely.

BKR: So in the course of learning all of this history, when did you first come to learn about Letty Lynton?

CL: The full history, probably about 20 years ago. She did over 80 films, dozens of TV appearances. And since Letty was not available, obviously I’d never seen it. It was kind of in the background, and I didn’t research it because there were so many other movies to watch and films to understand and learn about.

So probably about 20 years ago, I finally discovered the story, about the legal case and how interesting it was that it was a, I wouldn’t say a blockbuster, but it did very well. And the fashion, the Adrian dresses—it had a huge cultural impact, and it made lots of money for the studio. I started to really dig in, and I fully understand the legal proceedings.

It’s been on my wishlist for that entire time to somehow get it back out into public distribution. I did the math and I knew that sometime in the mid 2020s, oh my gosh, either the film or the underlying play was gonna become public domain. And just in the last year or so, the date was then set for the play. So from then on, I’ve just been full bore getting this thing back out.

BKR: So you’re doing this math. When do you first decide, “okay, I need to make a concrete step, I need to arrange a meeting or something to start this?”

CL: Last November of 2025, my math in my brain was that the underlying play Dishonored Lady, which did 150 or so Broadway shows, that public domain was going to occur December 31st, 2025. Essentially, January 1st, 2026.

So I spoke to Bruce Goldstein, I spoke to Scott Eyman, and they put me in touch with George Feltenstein. We set a date to meet, and I flew out to Hollywood, and we sat for two hours in the [Warner Bros. Lot] Starbucks, and plotted the return of Letty Lynton.

I’m not a lawyer, but I laid out my legal reasoning. And my legal reasoning was, Dishonored Lady becomes public domain. Any fruit of the tree, any derivative products of that now public domain piece of work becomes available again.

He said, “Yep. I’m taking it to the general counsel.” And I was biting my fingernails about it. Sometime in January, maybe early February, he sent me an email and he said, “we’re going with it. We’re going to TCM. That is the perfect place to premiere the 4K restoration of Letty Lynton.”

And I had one condition of George, and it was kind of in jest, but it wasn’t, I was serious. I said, “if this premiere is at TCM, I need to be there.” I didn’t mean presenting, I just had to be there and see it on the big screen. I had never seen it outside of the bootleg. Whoops.

So sometime in March maybe, I got an email from TCM. As soon as I could respond back, I said, “I will be there.” And they wanted me to present as well. And I said, “dream come true. I’m there.” Cleared my schedule. And here we are. May 1st for the premiere of the restoration; it hadn’t been seen in 90 years.

BKR: Wow. I am so surprised by how quickly this went.

CL: I was shocked as well. I thought maybe the 2027 TCM Festival. The film had to be taken off the shelf. It’s been on the shelf for 90 years -- taken off the shelf, restored. But George said it was in such pristine condition, it did not need much restoration to get it into the form that we saw on Friday at noon. So it was just amazing. Just amazing.

BKR: Do you know if that was based off of the original negatives or was there a copy?

CL: According to George, it was a safety film print made from the original. That’s why it was in such pristine shape. It still took work. It was still a process, but it wasn’t a restoration like we’ve all seen of just horribly destroyed films that they resurrect. This was in very good shape, if not almost pristine shape.

So it still took a lot of work, but they got it done so quickly. And I was just astounded. From November until I got the email in March, that we’re gonna premiere it on May 1st. Oh my God. Fantastic.

BKR: They were checking in with you at these milestones, but did they send you any previews or anything like that?

CL: No, I wanted to see it for the first time on the big screen. I wanted to see it fully restored. I did not want a link, I didn’t wanna look at it on my computer. I wanted to see it with a crowd of Joan fans. And that’s what happened. It was just amazing.

BKR: Do you have any idea how the bootleg happened?

CL: I’ve heard a couple of different theories. I won’t speak for George, but it sounds like someone may have grabbed the negative—but I have no evidence to say it—years ago, near decades ago, and struck a really bad copy of it. And of course successive bootlegs become more and more garbage over time, so there is no pristine copy out there outside of Warner Bros. So that’s just my theory, I don’t know.

BKR: Well, let’s talk about the movie a little bit. Can you give us a context for where Joan Crawford was in her career and how you see this film sitting in that?

CL: Yeah. So this was 1932. I think George or Eddie Muller said it on Friday: Grand Hotel was released like two weeks later. So she had two big films. In Grand Hotel, she’s more of a supporting role, but I think she steals the movie from everybody, of course.

So this was her big starring role. Robert Montgomery and Nils Asther, they play supporting roles. They’re main characters, but she runs the film. She is the focus of it.

It’s just a wonderful pre-code. It’s a fashion movie, it’s a crime drama. It’s so many different genres. And this is where, I think, she becomes a real movie star. She becomes Joan Crawford. There are so many closeups in that film—her eyes, her eyelashes, her cheeks, everything. She has become Joan Crawford.

So I think this is certainly not the peak of the mountain, but she’s there creating this persona. Joan came from abject poverty. She had a thick Texas drawl and she worked so hard to essentially create a facade. Not in a bad way, she just didn’t want to be from Texas, or Oklahoma, or anywhere—she wanted to be Joan Crawford.

And now that I’ve seen this movie, this is Joan Crawford. And she kept up the Joan Crawford persona through the time that I knew her as a child until the day she died.

BKR: Wow. Thinking about this creation of Joan—it’s a persona, but it’s also so physical. Right? Just the way that she looks. I was reading through reviews of the film in some old movie magazines, and so many people write in like, “I don’t understand why she’s over-lining her lips.” And I was like, “Babe, get used to it.”

CL: Absolutely. That was the new style. And she set so many fashion trends from then on for years. And Letty—the fashions in it are just amazing. Adrian just knocked himself out. With everything. Everything in the movie works.

BKR: Because those George Hurrell images are just so iconic, and the fact that they never really corresponded to anything was always so shocking.

CL: Exactly! And that’s a comment I’ve received from lots of fans. “I never knew,” the fans would say, “I never knew where those photos are from ‘cause we haven’t seen the film.” You saw everything up on screen on Friday. Everything, every single Hurrell—I call them luxurious photos because they are. Every single photo was up on screen during the film. It was just incredible.

BKR: Now that you’ve seen it in this way, do you have a favorite scene or something about her performance that really stuck out to you?

CL: Yeah. My favorite comedic part is when they had just pulled in with the ship, and she hops up and the press is there photographing her. And then twice through the movie, they show her picture from the paper—with the bug-eyes because she sees Nils Asther down on the dock.

But from a style perspective: when she first appears in the chiffon organdy white dress. And then, the one scene, she’s leaning back and he’s [Nils Asther] leaning over her, and they’re so close. But it’s a closeup and it’s such an odd angle, and it works so well to capture them.

Those are just two of my favorite scenes.

BKR: This has nothing to do with anything, but I love that you talk about her accent because I think her transatlantic accent is really good.

CL: Yeah. Yeah.

BKR: Like once maybe every three movies, she’ll let it slip for a second and it’s always my favorite part. She’ll drop a “y’all.” It’s great.

CL: Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. There were noted times when she’d be working, you know, 14 hour days, and she would just lose it. She’d slip right back into San Antonio, Texas drawl and no one could understand a word she was saying.

They’d have to cut and, “hey, let’s come back tomorrow.” Because she was just exhausted. It took energy just to keep up.

BKR: Yeah. It sounds exhausting, truly. So what was that like, to see Letty with a crowd? What was it like to hear all those people react for the first time?

CL: I have screened dozens of Joan movies. Just last Saturday the 25^th, I was in Philadelphia. We screened Johnny Guitar and probably half the crowd had seen it. It was the 4K restoration. Gorgeous, true color. The experience there was great.

This experience with 500 or so Joan fans, and I understand they had to turn away hundreds of people who wanted to get in, to see that for the first time, to be there for their first time—I can’t, I’m getting goosebumps right now. It was magical to see and to hear the reaction. It was pin drop quiet during the quiet scenes. There were cheers and laughter during the very appropriate scenes, I won’t give anything away.

It was just a magical experience, to be there with my wife, and to be there with George, who had put his career getting this film back into circulation. Just magical.

BKR: The woman next to me, when he drinks the poison, she was like, “take that, asshole!”

CL: Absolutely, of course. Yeah. The cheers. And again, I had not seen it. I’m not going to give away a point, but when he drinks the poison, there was another intention there. It wasn’t for that to happen. And I’m like, “oh my God, no! Oh, yeah.” You know, because it was a great little plot twist.

BKR: I do feel it’s going to be really important to add to her, I don’t know, toolbox, like when people talk about her as an actor. That scene where she yells at him, as it’s happening, is so vicious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so mean. She’s justifiably mean in that moment. Was that interesting to you?

CL: It was, yeah. That sequence. And I have to admit, when he got violent with her, it was very real to me. I was taken aback. But it was the whole motivation then for everything that happens.

Similarly, when I screen Baby Jane on the big screen, I get a visceral reaction when Bette Davis is beating up my grandmother. I know it’s not real, but it just hurts me when she does that. Same thing when we screened Letty because he’s so vicious in it.

BKR: Yeah. I think it’s hard because you know her obviously, but then knowing what she went through in her own relationships and knowing this would’ve been maybe a familiar dynamic to her.

CL: Yes. Absolutely.

BKR: I think there are a lot of meta conversations you could have about this film—her not finding the love that she had at home, and then marrying into this family that was very connected. Was there anything that struck you in that way where you’re just like, “Oh, I feel like she would’ve understood this in a very specific way?”

CL: Yeah, I do think so. Her coming from complete poverty and then coming to Hollywood, and marrying Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and being thrust into the Pickfair, Mary Pickford environment of beautiful dinners.

In the movie she’s rich. But I still get that sense from her persona that she still felt like an outsider. Even with being a chemical magnate, whatever her family industry was, she still felt like an outsider, and very lonely, very fragile. And I think that goes right to her own personal history. Of being poor and then just being thrust into this new world, of I wouldn’t say excess, but to be able to afford anything you want.

BKR: So talk to me a little bit about the relationship with TCM. You already said that the plan, kind of from the beginning, was to premiere it at TCM. Why did that seem like a good place to George and why did that seem like a good place to you?

CL: Yeah, that was part of our conversation in November. Where would be the perfect place to premiere it? There was no question it was TCM. TCM does restoration premieres almost every year. They do birthday milestone celebrations of films of actors. It’s a worldwide audience, and this festival is comprised of such caring fans. The outpouring of the fan support just in the weeks running up to this has been phenomenal.

But TCM was the only place we were going to do this because of the reputation, how much care TCM has with all of their restorations and premieres, and just how they do things here.

BKR: I know a lot of film festivals have restoration premieres or just feature them. Are you planning to submit to other festivals to show it?

CL: I think so. Time will tell. That’s the next conversation with George at Warner Bros. It’s already been converted to digital format. So it’s ready to go. I’ll work with them to come up with a list of where they would want to see it shown, and I’ll be there in a heartbeat for any new audiences that want to see the film.

BKR: Oh, that’s so exciting. Could you give a pitch for Letty Lynton? Why should people see it? For new viewers.

CL: New viewers? I would say if you want a mix of a wonderful pre-code production, the fashions, everything by Adrian—every single scene had a new dress in it, worn by Joan. And then you have this seedy crime element as well. It’s got to be seen and hasn’t been seen for 90 years. So it’s a must-see picture at this time.

BKR: Is there anything else you’d like to add before we go?

CL: Yeah, I just want to just give complete credit to George, his staff, the general counsel at Warner Bros., for getting this back out into circulation. They’ve already announced June 30th as the Blu-Ray release date.

I think Warner Bros. is going to have a ton of requests to show the film. Even back in Pennsylvania, we have a bunch of local, very good repertory houses. I’m sure I’ll be at Film Forum with Bruce Goldstein soon to show the film. It’s not going to be a wide release, but it’s going to be at the repertory houses for sure. In due time.

BKR: I’m gonna bring everyone I know. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

CL: My pleasure.