Post by petrolino on Mar 24, 2018 21:42:50 GMT
'The Reckless Moment' is a concerned crime drama based upon the novel 'The Blank Wall' by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) asks lowlife Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick) to stay away from her 17 year old daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks) who's enrolled at art school. A tangled series of events causes Irish hoodlum Martin Donnelly (James Mason) to enter the scene with some financial demands.
The domestic drama 'The Reckless Moment' provides a methodical account of a woman's efforts to juggle her responsibilities, something she does at the expense of her health and happiness. The saying "a woman's work is never done" can be applied here as Lucia Harper is always doing something or being called upon to answer for something. Joan Bennett deconstructs her mind on camera without compromising Lucia's strengths and adaptability. It's a fascinating performance to observe, which is exactly what director Max Ophuls does by employing close-ups and activating elegant indoor tracking shots.
'The Reckless Moment' is a fine portrait of a woman with more on her mind than is reasonable. Joan Bennett is gifted vivid support from Geraldine Brooks as her daughter Bea and David Blair as her young son David. Music for the film is composed by Hans Salter.
"David, I told you not to take so much butter!"
'Can't Get Enough' - Suede
'Can't Get Enough' - Suede
The domestic drama 'The Reckless Moment' provides a methodical account of a woman's efforts to juggle her responsibilities, something she does at the expense of her health and happiness. The saying "a woman's work is never done" can be applied here as Lucia Harper is always doing something or being called upon to answer for something. Joan Bennett deconstructs her mind on camera without compromising Lucia's strengths and adaptability. It's a fascinating performance to observe, which is exactly what director Max Ophuls does by employing close-ups and activating elegant indoor tracking shots.
"What makes a thriller “domestic,” anyway? Broadly speaking, it takes place in a house. Domestic thrillers are horror stories about the emotional labor that maintains the private sphere going terribly awry; think of the way towel straightening and pantry rearranging become acts of violence in Sleeping with the Enemy, transforming Julia Roberts’s new home, at the climax, into an uncanny country where she’s always a stranger. Sleeping with the Enemy was released the same year as Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, and while Faludi herself criticized nineties domestic thrillers for preying on women’s fears about their changing roles in a postfeminist world, it seems more accurate to say the films expressed those fears — many of them were, after all, based on novels and screenplays by women — much as post–Word War II film noir expressed anxieties about reintegrating men into the social order after what they had seen and done overseas.
In fact, nineties domestic thrillers have their precursors in the 1940s subgenres of melodramatic noir and women’s suspense that rose alongside more traditionally masculine postwar noir. Alfred Hitchcock’s films about murderous husbands and male family members in the early forties — Rebecca, Suspicion, and Shadow of a Doubt — kicked off a decade of domestic thrillers that invited noirish paranoia into the house, including George Cukor’s Gaslight, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, and Joseph Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number. Perhaps the apex of these films is Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment, adapted in 1949 from an Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel first published in Ladies’ Home Journal. Ophüls’s last Hollywood film before he returned to Europe to make a trio of baroque masterpieces, The Reckless Moment stars Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, a housewife moved to superhuman acts of will to preserve the fragile sanctity of her middle-class home in a lakefront suburb of LA."
- Amy Gentry, The Paris Review
"Max Ophuls shot the film 'The Reckless Moment' on an obviously small budget (Joan Bennett’s star had faded and it was only James Mason’s third American film) for Columbia, which specialized in the budget-minded first run picture. The film is rife with strains of “goony” dialogue, unnatural exclamations, one-sided phone conversations whipped through at a sprint and other conventions of studio pictures. Ophuls masterfully shapes it all into a portrait not just of suburban middle class security shaken into chaos when it collides with big city corruption, but of the social prison of middle class family.
Ophuls’ camera moves with his usual grace, tracking and panning and tilting with the action, but this isn’t the elegant dance of his European films, waltzing through the rituals and facades of high society. He’s after the busy-ness and bustle of American life: the flutter of kids in the house, the pockets of low-lifes hanging out in the dinghy hotel lobbies and bars, the throngs on the street. We may catch a little of these lives in passing before moving on, as if they all have stories themselves, but never pause to consider them, for the camera is completely wedded to Lucia and her movement in both private and public. Even in crowds he isolates Lucia from the throngs, more alone than ever even surrounded by her neighbors. Ophuls also knows when to still the camera, especially as Lucia finds herself increasingly constrained and trapped by her surroundings. When she goes for a loan, the office becomes a veritable cell, and Ophuls constantly frames her behind railings, like prison bars. Through it all, but for a few key scenes, we are essentially locked into Lucia’s experience."
- Sean Axmaker, 'The Reckless Moment : Max Ophuls’ Masterpiece Of Middle Class America'
"In a day and age when film buffs and writers speak at length about glory deferred — Jeff Bridges is frequently cited as one of our most underrated actors — a case can be made for Joan Bennett as one of the more egregiously overlooked talents in the annals of film history. Academy Award nominations are often judged to be the barometer of career success; Bridges, it must be said, has been honored on seven such occasions. Joan Bennett never received an Oscar nomination; but then, her best film work was ahead of its time. Sadder still is the realization that time has yet to catch up with her. Had she received a nomination or two, it’s tempting to wonder whether or not she’d enjoy a higher profile than she does now."
- Edward Copeland, 'Joan Bennett : Centennial Tributes'
In fact, nineties domestic thrillers have their precursors in the 1940s subgenres of melodramatic noir and women’s suspense that rose alongside more traditionally masculine postwar noir. Alfred Hitchcock’s films about murderous husbands and male family members in the early forties — Rebecca, Suspicion, and Shadow of a Doubt — kicked off a decade of domestic thrillers that invited noirish paranoia into the house, including George Cukor’s Gaslight, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, and Joseph Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number. Perhaps the apex of these films is Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment, adapted in 1949 from an Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel first published in Ladies’ Home Journal. Ophüls’s last Hollywood film before he returned to Europe to make a trio of baroque masterpieces, The Reckless Moment stars Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, a housewife moved to superhuman acts of will to preserve the fragile sanctity of her middle-class home in a lakefront suburb of LA."
- Amy Gentry, The Paris Review
"Max Ophuls shot the film 'The Reckless Moment' on an obviously small budget (Joan Bennett’s star had faded and it was only James Mason’s third American film) for Columbia, which specialized in the budget-minded first run picture. The film is rife with strains of “goony” dialogue, unnatural exclamations, one-sided phone conversations whipped through at a sprint and other conventions of studio pictures. Ophuls masterfully shapes it all into a portrait not just of suburban middle class security shaken into chaos when it collides with big city corruption, but of the social prison of middle class family.
Ophuls’ camera moves with his usual grace, tracking and panning and tilting with the action, but this isn’t the elegant dance of his European films, waltzing through the rituals and facades of high society. He’s after the busy-ness and bustle of American life: the flutter of kids in the house, the pockets of low-lifes hanging out in the dinghy hotel lobbies and bars, the throngs on the street. We may catch a little of these lives in passing before moving on, as if they all have stories themselves, but never pause to consider them, for the camera is completely wedded to Lucia and her movement in both private and public. Even in crowds he isolates Lucia from the throngs, more alone than ever even surrounded by her neighbors. Ophuls also knows when to still the camera, especially as Lucia finds herself increasingly constrained and trapped by her surroundings. When she goes for a loan, the office becomes a veritable cell, and Ophuls constantly frames her behind railings, like prison bars. Through it all, but for a few key scenes, we are essentially locked into Lucia’s experience."
- Sean Axmaker, 'The Reckless Moment : Max Ophuls’ Masterpiece Of Middle Class America'
"In a day and age when film buffs and writers speak at length about glory deferred — Jeff Bridges is frequently cited as one of our most underrated actors — a case can be made for Joan Bennett as one of the more egregiously overlooked talents in the annals of film history. Academy Award nominations are often judged to be the barometer of career success; Bridges, it must be said, has been honored on seven such occasions. Joan Bennett never received an Oscar nomination; but then, her best film work was ahead of its time. Sadder still is the realization that time has yet to catch up with her. Had she received a nomination or two, it’s tempting to wonder whether or not she’d enjoy a higher profile than she does now."
- Edward Copeland, 'Joan Bennett : Centennial Tributes'
Joan Bennett
'The Reckless Moment' is a fine portrait of a woman with more on her mind than is reasonable. Joan Bennett is gifted vivid support from Geraldine Brooks as her daughter Bea and David Blair as her young son David. Music for the film is composed by Hans Salter.
