Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)

 

Max Ophuls’ Caught follows the journey of Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes) and her relationship with two men placed at economic, social and emotional extremes from each other, the title seeming to refer primarily to the imprisoning gravity of money and the power it bestows. The film is driven by Leonora’s conflicted impulses and motivations: she enrolls in a “charm school” to increase her social effectiveness, takes a job as a department store model, and accepts an invitation to a party on a yacht belonging to the super-rich Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), but her ambivalence and reluctance are often evident, and although she’s frequently criticized during the film for being preoccupied with marrying well, it appears to be more of an imposed attitude than a deeply-felt one. Ohlrig does marry her, but with equal lack of conviction, perhaps primarily just to prove a therapist wrong, thereafter wearing her down with his disregard. The film doesn’t demonize Ohlrig, showing him to be in the grip of various kinds of malaise, but in the end he simply fades from relevance, a structural choice intriguingly balanced by how the other man in Leonora’s life, an idealistic doctor for whom she takes a low-paid receptionist job after attempting to break from her husband and who helps refine her values doesn’t appear until almost halfway into the movie (notwithstanding James Mason’s top billing). There’s something rather startling about the film’s ultimate deployment of death as a necessary ultimate step toward redemption, its twist on the familiar intertwining of biology and destiny, the impact into the material world rippling outward (the final image is of a once-prized fur coat being carried away). And if not one of Ophuls’ very greatest works, Caught is (of course) consistently visually eloquent and striking, whether exploring the alienatingly vast interiors of Ohlrig’s Long Island mansion or the drastically contrasting no-place-to-turn East Side spaces.

The Widow (Nam-ok Park, 1955)

 

Nam-ok Park’s 1955 film The Widow is highly worthwhile viewing, notable as the first Korean film to be directed by a woman, and marked by its sympathetic treatment of female perspectives. Shin is a single mother, widowed by the war, established in the early scenes as weighed down by money problems but also as independent-spirited, not inclined to settle; she’s financially assisted by an older acquaintance, but doesn’t sleep with him, contrary to his wife’s suspicions. Meanwhile the wife herself has a lover, Taek, who eventually in turn falls for Shin, their marriage plans imperiled by the return of Taek’s old love, whom he’d assumed to be also dead. The film’s examination of societal pressures on women evokes Ozu’s films of the period, but the comparison (not an entirely fair one of course) rather underlines The Widow’s lack of formal rigour and the relative softness of its approach (perhaps summed up by the recurring use of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening). At the time of writing, the film can only be viewed in a truncated version in which the second-last reel is without a soundtrack, and the final reel is missing altogether, and although that’s obviously objectively not for the best, it does lend what’s left a rather singular vanishing quality. Just before the sound disappears, the film briefly detours for the first time into becoming a musical, and then a narrative that seemed geared toward a romantic coming together becomes one of separation, felt all the more deeply for the silence, underlined by a series of shots of her feet as she walks alone, and then later by a corresponding series of his feet, and a final shot of Taek alone in the night, staring in the direction of his lost love, the sudden imposition of the end seeming to define an absence and a longing that can never be filled or mitigated.