Tuesday, February 26, 2019

The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)



Max Ophuls’ (or as the credits have it, Opuls’) The Reckless Moment is a fascinating incursion of noir-ish menace into superficially perfect domesticity, a thematic precursor of sorts to Blue Velvet. The two worlds cross in the opening sequence, as Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) drives from her bucolic small town into the sleazy heart of LA, to confront a low-life who’s dating her teenage daughter; within days, he’ll be dead, killed by the anchor attached to the family’s boat, and she’ll be dealing with a blackmailer, in possession of an intimate stash of letters. Ophuls portrays Lucia’s life as a relentless treadmill of undisciplined children, an ever-present and largely infantilized father-in-law (who sleeps in the same room as her young son), runaway expenses, and limited privacy, whether at home or elsewhere (this being a community where everyone knows everyone) – the husband’s chronic absence for work, even over Christmas, underlines the structural imbalances (the film’s treatment of the family’s black maid Sybil - a major supporting role for which Frances E. Williams goes scandalously uncredited – might warrant an essay in itself). The blackmailer Donnelly (the always marvelous James Mason) is as much poignantly would-be lover as adversary, seeing in Lucia’s life an embodiment of his own failure; and yet the movie suggests we’re merely observing contrasting forms of confinement (“You have your family, I have my Nagel,” says Donnelly in one of the film’s more memorably odd lines, referring to his menacing business partner) Ophuls presents the house as a spacious, materialist dream, its underbelly revealed through the vivid play of nighttime shadows. The ending closes off the incursion, reasserting the family imperative, but underlining the husband’s continuing absence; Ophuls’ brilliant framing leaves a sense of submergence and defeat as much as triumph. Further disquiet flows from the (still relevant) moral question that runs through the movie: how strongly should the interests of the privileged override the rights of a more visibly tainted underclass…?

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