"Lost" Joan Crawford Film to Be Shown at 2026 TCM Film Festival
This 1932 Joan Crawford film has spent nearly a century locked inside a vault...until now...
Public Domain is a beautiful thing and for even more proof of that fact, look no further than the recent news that a previously “banned” and “lost” film has been restored—and this new restoration will premiere at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival on May 1st.
The film is called Letty Lynton and it was produced in 1932 starring Joan Crawford alongside Robert Montgomery. This was at a time when she was at the peak of her popularity at the studio and the film was a huge hit upon its release. But several years later, in 1936, Letty Lynton was removed from circulation.
It became the center of a copyright infringement case after the authors of the 1930 play Dishonored Lady claimed the Letty Lynton script plagiarized much of their work. The thing was both works were inspired by the same real life case: the 1857 murder trial of Madeline Smith. For some backstory, Smith had been the eldest of five, born to an upper-middle-class family in Glasgow.
She began an affair, unbeknownst to her parents, with a man named Pierre Emile L’Angelier who was 10 years her senior. They would meet up in secret and they exchanged countless letters professing their love for each other. Well, her parents eventually found her an appropriate suitor and Madeline tried to break things off with L’Angelier, but he wouldn’t have it. She tried to get her letters back from him and he threatened to use them to out her to the world. Madeline then procured some arsenic from a local druggist and poisoned her lover. The police found her letters and she was arrested and tried for her crimes.
Letty Lynton the film was itself based on a novel of the same name, which MGM owned the rights to, but the court sided with the folks behind Dishonored Lady, citing too much similarity between them. Letty Lynton was pulled and has remained in a vault for the last 90 years or so. Meanwhile, Dishonored Lady was turned into a movie of its own in 1947, starring Hedy Lamarr, but late last year, Joan Crawford’s grandson petitioned to Warner Brothers that the copyright on Dishonored Lady, the play, would expire on December 31st, making it possible to release Letty Lynton once again.
And so Turner Classic Movies and Warner worked on a new 4K restoration of the lost film, which will make its premiere at the 2026 TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles. This will be the first legal screening of the film in almost a century. And for those who can’t make it to the festival, Warner Archive will be releasing the restored film on physical media later this year.
