Director: Max Ophüls
Adapted from Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which would also serve as the source material for a 2001 film entitled The Deep End with Tilda Swinton in the leading role, The Reckless Moment is the last picture that Max Ophüls made in Hollywood, and it is among the biggest deviations that he made from the romantic films that he built his reputation on. Joan Bennett plays a woman who attempts to cover up her daughter’s accidental murder of a callous, much older lover. After disposing of the body, James Mason shows up at her doorstep and blackmails Bennett, having found the love letters that the daughter had sent to the boyfriend prior to his death. In the way that Ophüls plays with morality and the shifting relationships between criminals and victims, the picture is familiar of Hitchcock. The scene in which Bennett is covering up the murder is shot with a number of long tracking shots, cutting intermittently to examine the eerily desolate landscape. Just as Hitchcock was fascinated by silence, Ophüls refrains from using any score in this sequence – all that is on the soundtrack is the sound of the boat’s motor as Bennett rides out into the sea. Besides the formal achievements, the picture is memorable due to Mason’s blackmailer, a predator who is nonetheless kind-hearted and wrecked with his own guilt. Watch how he defensively reiterates to Bennett that Nagle, the partner that he speaks of, is real. In the way that Mason delivers the line, the audience can come to any number of conclusions about the relationship between the two blackmailers, and how Mason himself is a victim of his accomplice.
Director: Max Ophüls
The first of the two noirs that Max Ophüls directed in Hollywood, Caught is a scathing cultural critique sometimes undone by its tendency to overstate. Barbara Bel Geddes plays a young woman whose sole ambition is to marry rich. She succeeds in gaining the hand of the ultra-possessive Robert Ryan, who considers her as his wife to be an employee. Ophüls was always a feminist director, and in this picture he sympathizes with the expectations placed upon women by the media. It is significant that Bel Geddes is not solely criticized for her warped world view – the way that her arc plays out suggests that her attraction to the rich lifestyle is a sickness in the vein of alcoholism or drug addiction. The first images of the film are stills from fashion and modeling magazines, suggesting the dangerous allurement of celebrity and the way that women, in particular, are targeted by the fashion editors. The picture is well-acted and has moments of genuine suspense, however it begins to spin its wheels in the final act as the script bombards the audience with a multitude of speeches about how unimportant it is to be rich, a point that had been made clear an hour previous.
Director: Max Ophüls
An exile from his native Germany after the Reichstag fire of 1933, Max Ophüls lived in France throughout the thirties before moving to the United States in 1941. He was fired from his first directing gig in Hollywood due to his slow pace – the Howard Hughes produced Vendetta, which was eventually released in 1950 with Mel Ferrer as the credited director – however in 1947 Ophüls would be hired by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to direct a historical swashbuckler that he had written and intended to produce. While an action picture seems out of character for Ophüls when one considers the elegiac grandiosity of his more typical romances, he brings to the picture his penchant for long tracking shots, following characters up and down stairs and from room to room, defining spaces and enriching them with detail. Additionally, though in its latter half The Exile is little more than a canvas on which Fairbanks can show off his gymnastics, it is the ill-fated romance that is at the heart of the picture. The Hollywood ending was bitter enough – Fairbanks chooses to retain the crown rather than going off with the lowly inn keep and flower girl, played by a delightful Rita Corday (billed as Paule Croset) – but the European ending even further amplified the girl’s feelings of abandonment, as the camera literally pans away from her to glimpse the plaque that celebrates the rightful king’s newly restored legacy.
Director: Max Ophüls
An anthology film of three short stories adapted from the work of acclaimed French author Guy de Maupassant, Max Ophüls’ Le Plaisir, while undoubtedly a stunning visual achievement, feels a bit slight. The second of these segments – in which a group of prostitutes attend a First Communion mass – receives the lion’s share of the screen time, whereas the bookending segments are fairly enjoyable if forgettable minor tangents. Ophüls’ camera movements are key to his vision, and the fluidity of motion in Le Plaisir is as impressive as any of works – watch the way the camera floats along the exterior of the brothel without ever entering. The bonds that link each of these shorts to the concept of pleasure seems flimsy, and the film seems so light and inconsequential that only the aesthetic lingers after the narrative content has dissipated from memory. I will confess to not understanding the appeal of Ophüls’ work – only Letters From an Unknown Woman is wholly satisfying to me – however devotees of his universe will likely find more pleasure in Le Plaisir than I managed to.
