For Reel

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.