DVD of the Week
#16 - The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)This is a fascinating, brilliant noiresque melodrama from German director Max Ophuls. Brought to Hollywood by Howard Hughes, Ophuls was fired from the eccentric producer's notorious vanity project
Vendetta, but made four films in the next three years, before trundling off to France and great success.
The Reckless Moment was his last American film.
Joan Bennett – a staple of Fritz Lang's excursions in the noir genre – is cast most effectively as a Lake Tahoe housewife, trying to cover up a murder apparently committed by her daughter. Deserted by her husband for Christmas – he's away on a business trip* – she tangles with Irish blackmailer James Mason and his ferocious, softly-spoken accomplice, Mr Nagel.
The film's masterstroke is in placing its generic hallmarks – the sleazy, manipulative older man duping an innocent, the brooding blackmailer and the merciless hand of fate – within (and against) such a well-realised familial set-up, in such a comfortable, ordinary, well-lit community. The bright house, like something from a TV soap, is contrasted superbly with the other-worldly eerieness of the boat house at night.
NightmareA similar juxtaposition: a nightmare fast unravelling within an ideal, was used in Nicholas Ray's terrific
Bigger Than Life. Here, Ophüls also uses visual tricks to telegraph danger and impending catastrophe, as in the lights-on/lights-off sequence that commences the film's first night. The director's trademark tracking shots are also much in evidence: there's a tremendous one to set the scene as Bennett returns from Los Angeles some five minutes in.
The film is powered by Bennett's edgy, protective central performance. She's a nervous tic in human form as her character juggles traditional responsibilities with new ones, like trying to raise £10,000 in two days. The scenes in which she is gradually, casually degraded by uncaring loan companies and pawnbrokers are masterfully done. What other film would bother to show that?
BelievableHer scene with Mason in a car crossing a lake, is similarly potent, with eloquent dialogue forcefully delivered. At times betraying the B-movie woodenness that ultimately prevented Bennett ever being a top drawer star, her housewife nevertheless has a certain something more real, more compelling, more caring, more obsessively, believably maternal than almost any other on-screen parent of the period. Mason also gives one of his best performances (though when was he ever weak?), and his final confrontation with Bennett is an absolute gem. There's also fine work by David Bair, and by Geraldine Brooks as our would-be murderer.
The Reckless Moment is fast-moving, persuasive entertainment, written and shot with an eye for the unusual. It's topped off with a curious (albeit fatalistic) happy-ish ending. Its themes are as enduring as its poetic imagery. Bennett's emotional and sexual repression (neither relieved by any outlet), the mundane practicalities of domestic '40s life and the soon-to-be-familiar 'generation gap' conflicts within the family unit give this home front noir a feel that's all its own.
The Reckless Moment is available on Region 2 DVD for around £7.*The original story was set in World War Two, hence the absence of the husband. Bennett's scenes on the telephone with her husband (and her conversation about him with his father) bear some resemblance to those in a great American home front picture released five years before:
Since You Went Away. Claudette Colbert's surprising tour-de-force at the heart of that film is one of the few screen mothers on a par with Bennett's.
The Reckless Moment also recalls a 1948 noir in which a happy post-war bubble is cruelly punctured – this time by Robert Ryan – the twisty-turny
Act of Violence.
DVD of the Week archive:
#1 - Let's Get Lost (Bruce Weber, 1988)
#2 - Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)
#3 - The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
#4 - The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)
#5 - The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
#6 - Written and Directed by Preston Sturges (Preston Sturges, 1940-44)
#7 – The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)#8 - Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)#9 - Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)#10 - No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorsese, 2005)#11 - Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)#12 – A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)#13 - Lady on a Train (Charles David, 1945)#14 - Just Like Heaven (Mark Waters, 2005)#15 - The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1934)Thanks for reading - more next week.
