BIG HOUSE FILM REVIEWS ~ Roger Westcombe
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THE RECKLESS MOMENT (1949)
Starring Joan Bennett, James Mason, Geraldine Brooks; dir: Max Ophuls
The Reckless Moment makes an interesting entrant in the postwar ‘suburban threat’ stratum of thrillers. Put simply, the emergence of suburbia and ‘white flight’ from the cities after the war intermingled anxieties that many thrillers were quick to exploit, from as early as Shadow of A Doubt (1943) to Cape Fear (1955) at the extremes, to numerous ‘B’ and ‘A-pictures’ inbetween, especially around the turn of the decade.
The interesting wrinkle The Reckless Moment brings to this strand of thriller is The Absent Male and its corollary of the (in effect) single mother. This being almost the 1950s there must be a father figure, but the husband of Joan Bennett’s Lucia Harper character is never seen nor heard in The Reckless Moment, nor does he exert any influence, as ghosts in the machine sometimes can.
No, this is Lucia’s show, and she proves mighty competent at extricating her daughter from extortion, throwing the cops off the scent when the family is threatened by a murder investigation, thwarting blackmail and all the while keeping three squares on the table for demanding teen son David and his ineffectual granddad! (By Hollywood standards, this makes for an interesting non-nuclear family, resonant of the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ wartime syndrome where the head of the household’s absence Over There was coped with just nicely, thank you.) Absent hubby is continually presented as a cure-all Lucia, in fact, doesn’t need. So can it be too surprising when James Mason starts to fall for this husky-voiced, slightly put-upon superwoman?
Without revealing why this is a plot twist, Mason’s gradual melting is the film’s weak link and more convincingly portrayed in the 2001 remake (The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton – an unusually good contempo Hollywood thriller). Mason’s Martin Donnelly character continually complains to Lucia that the family is smothering her, but the reality is it’s just normal life – the usual static and burr-in-the-saddle stuff without which we feel alone. It’s convincingly portrayed too.
Interestingly we can see a link between the family scenes with their hassles and distractions and the similarly bumpy ride of the street scenes in the tenderloin district into which Lucia must descend later in the picture. The contrast from the fluffy cloud-filled sky of her middle class normalcy to the murky grime of pawnshops and tenements is stark - the different classes even get different weather!
Ophuls (streamlined inexplicably by Hollywood to Opuls ) was renowned for long leisurely camerawork that was constantly moving and the fluid camerawork here just seems very naturalistic. We move seamlessly amongst the characters and through their world with them. Mason, with whom Ophuls had collaborated the previous year in the brisk, Wellesian thriller Caught , was even (as quoted in John Russell Taylor’s Strangers in Paradise, 1983) moved to verse:
A shot that does not call for tracks, Is agony for poor dear Max
Who separated from his dolly, Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.So European is the cinematic grammar and overall look of The Reckless Moment it is easy to imagine viewing it with subtitles. Like Lubitsch, Ophuls was, as Taylor says, one of those 'self-contained' filmmakers who carried their vision around with them, and when the chance came to return to his beloved France the next year he followed The Reckless Moment with the worldwide smash La Ronde (1950) with which he made his name – no longer streamlined!
