by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two
nights ago Charles and I had watched a quite remarkable movie from 1949, a
Columbia film noir
called The Reckless Moment,
directed by Max Ophuls from a script by Mel Dinelli, Robert E. Kent
(“adaptation”), Henry Garson and Robert Soderberg (“screenplay”) based on a Ladies’
Home Journal story
called “The Blank Wall” by a writer with the rather awkward name Elizabeth
Sanxay Holding. It’s a rarely shown movie that I’d been curious about ever
since seeing, reviewing and absolutely raving about the 2001 remake, The
Deep End, by Scott
McGehee and David Siegel as co-writers, co-directors and co-producers. The film
stars Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, whose husband is off in Europe helping with
the post-World War II reconstruction and whose 17-year-old daughter Bea
(Geraldine Brooks, who praise be looks enough like Joan Bennett that they’re perfectly believable
as mother and daughter, a rarity in any movie; all too often casting directors merrily assign
people who look nothing like each other and try to pass them off as biological
relatives!) is messing around with a 30-year-old lounge-lizard slimeball named
Ted Darby (Sheppherd Strudwick). Bea met Darby in Los Angeles, a 50-mile drive
from the small beach community of “Balboa” (Santa Barbara?) where the Harpers
live, where Lucia had allowed her to attend art college instead of going to a
university. Lucia goes to the hotel bar where Darby hangs out and tears into
him, ordering him not to see her daughter again, and Darby of course tells her
to go get stuffed. Later Darby comes to Balboa for reasons that aren’t
especially clear and Bea meets him there; he asks her for money, and that
convinces Bea that every nasty thing her mom had to say about him was
absolutely true and she confronts him then and there — they fight, Bea hits him
with a flashlight, and he takes a header off their deck and lands on an anchor,
impaling himself.
Thinking she’s actually helping, Lucia loads Darby’s body
into her outboard-motor boat, dumps it in mid-bay and returns it, all in the
dead of night, and decides to cover for Bea’s actions by telling the police (if
they ask) that she and Darby never knew each other — only a blackmailer named
Ted Donnelly (James Mason, star of Ophuls’ immediately preceding film Caught and billed first on the imdb.com page
for the film and its entry in The Film Noir Encyclopedia but second to Bennett on the actual
credits — was the film later reissued, when Mason was a more important star,
with his name first?) shows up with a packet of love letters Bea wrote Darby
and demands $5,000 for them. From then on the film becomes a clash between
Lucia’s visits to the noir
underworld in a frantic attempt to raise the blackmail money without having to
tell her husband what’s going on, and the fascinating pull-back of her
middle-class suburban lifestyle — symbolized by her buttinski father-in-law
(Henry O’Neill), Bea’s obnoxious kid brother David (David Bair) and their Black
maid, Sybil (Frances Williams), who all seem to be hanging around whenever she
wants to talk to Donnelly on the phone or he shows up. Donnelly has an attack
of conscience about what he’s doing and seems inclined to go easy on Lucia, so
his partner in crime, Nagle (Roy Roberts), turns up in person to put the
squeeze on Lucia — only Donnelly confronts him, they fight, the wounded
Donnelly strangles Nagle and then takes him out in his car and deliberately
crashes it, killing himself and making Nagle’s death look accidental.
The
Reckless Moment and The
Deep End are
surprisingly close; McGehee and Siegel made one major change in the story —
instead of a straight daughter, Bea becomes Beau, the heroine’s Gay son (and
the blackmail device becomes, not a packet of letters, but a videotape of Darby
fucking Beau) — and a handful of minor ones; they moved the setting to Lake
Tahoe (and turned the California-Nevada border into a metaphoric boundary
between decency and corruption much the way the U.S.-Mexico border served in Touch
of Evil) and changed the
blackmailer’s agent from an Irishman (casting Mason as an Irishman seems to
have been inspired by his success as an Irish revolutionary in the film Odd
Man Out two years
earlier) to a refugee from the former Yugoslavia — but both films turn on the
marvelous contrast between Lucia’s (forced) walk on the wild side and her
sturdy suburban values, and in particular the household members that hem her in
so much Donnelly even comments, “These people really have you trapped, don’t
they?” The acting is excellent throughout, with Bennett ironically appearing as
the ordinary person trapped in the noir underworld just a few years after making The Woman in
the Window (1945) and Scarlet
Street (1946), in which
she was the femme fatale
and Edward G. Robinson the milquetoast she was leading to destruction. But what
makes The Reckless Moment
special is Ophuls’ direction, particularly his use of the moving camera — it
seems to have been Ophuls’ style never to cut until he absolutely had to, but
instead to take us from place to place on a camera dolly, and according to an
imdb.com poster James Mason said about the film that at one point Ophuls wanted
to have two sets fully lit simultaneously so he could dolly from one to the
other. Columbia president Harry Cohn said no, and, according to Mason, “Ophuls
could not smile anymore from this day.”
The Reckless Moment dramatizes, just as vividly as The
Deep End did, the
contrast between the heroine’s safe suburban existence and the noir underworld in which she is plunged; and
contrary to what’s been written about the film, there really isn’t the hint of
a romantic interest between Lucia and Donnelly; instead, as in The Deep End, what seems to change Donnelly’s moral
status and lead him to sympathize with the woman he’s trying to blackmail is
his attraction towards her “normal” suburban lifestyle. Also, though the film
is not explicitly Gay (as its remake is — under the Production Code, of course,
it couldn’t have been), there’s an interesting intimation of a homoerotic
relationship between Donnelly and Nagle (“You have a family, I have Nagle,” he
tells Lucia at one point), anticipating the role Mason would play 10 years
later in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as the rich, decadent Bisexual who’s clearly keeping Eva
Marie Saint as a girlfriend and Martin Landau as a boyfriend. (In North by
Northwest, when Landau’s
character tries to warn Mason’s — accurately — that Saint’s character has
betrayed him to the government, Mason whines, “Leonard! I do believe you’re jealous!”) Just as Joan Bennett had gone from
playing the femme fatale
who draws the ordinary person into the noir world to playing the ordinary person who
gets drawn into it and has to cope with its weirdly inverted values, so James
Mason would go from the innocent young man drawn into both a criminal and a
homosexual relationship with a decadent older partner to playing the decadent older
partner pulling the same sort of thing with both genders in North by
Northwest.
