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You've got to care about money to a certain extent
Last night I met with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants to watch Max Ophüls' Caught (1949), the first of his two American films noirs. It's not as complex or as coherent a picture as its follow-up The Reckless Moment (1949), which stunned me in May, but it's a striking, strange, surprisingly blunt examination of the ways in which a woman can be trapped and bound by social conventions, constructions of gender, her own body and the laws which govern it. Much of it is still all too relevant and recognizable today, and I don't say that just because the film opens with two roommates morosely totaling their limited finances and complaining about the humidity.
At first the story looks like a simple cautionary tale: the terrifying ease with which a Cinderella romance can turn into a Bluebeard marriage. Despite his brusque manner and his contemptuous affections, ex-carhop and recent charm school graduate Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) allows herself to accept a proposal of marriage from high-powered businessman Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), because he's worth ninety million and how do you say no to that? No sooner are the wedding headlines yesterday's news than the reality of Leonora's situation sets in: her husband is a chilly, controlling, volatile man who gets his philosophy straight from Ayn Rand; he views every interaction as a transaction and despises his wife for marrying him, because her acquiescence only proves that he met her asking price. He only married her to spite his psychiatrist.1 Very sensibly, she flees Ohlrig's cavernous rococo mansion and takes a job as a receptionist in an East Side clinic where she forms a friendship with unfazeable obstetrician Dr. Hoffman (Frank Ferguson) and something closer with his partner Dr. Larry Quinada (James Mason), an idealistic dropout from the upper middle class still figuring out what a bedside manner looks like. "I'm a very good textbook doctor," he admits after his underestimation of an anxious mother risks a child's life; he's tactless and prone to mansplaining, but we are encouraged to view him sympathetically in part because the film consistently calls him on it and he actually learns. He's the obvious romantic hero. He can't quite understand why Leonora is shy of him, especially when the mutual attraction is as plain as the smile on her face. Inevitably he proposes to her, but she's still married to Ohlrig and there's an additional catch . . .
This is almost exactly the two-thirds mark of the film, by which point it had taken several turns neither of us was expecting. I wasn't even expecting the main characters, honestly. Turn the trope kaleidoscope a little and Smith Ohlrig could be the alpha hero of a billionaire romance, wealthy, workaholic, control-freakish and ultimately vulnerable—but he exists in the real world, and so he's an abusive asshole. He gives a touching speech about the hardship of his upbringing in which we learn that his father only left him four million, he had to bootstrap the rest: "I didn't drink it away, I didn't gamble it away, I didn't marry it away . . . That's what everyone wants, isn't it? Well, I've got it. And I made it myself." When he can't get what he wants by social leverage or main force of money, he suffers apparent life-threatening nervous attacks that he attributes to "a bad heart." The aptness of his words bypasses him completely. He needs either to own people or destroy them. As Skygiants pointed out, the film is a primer on the ways in which a relationship can be abusive without physical violence. Ohlrig never lays a hand on Leonora. He doesn't need to, when he controls her finances and her social access. He calls his wife his highest-paid employee, treats her as if she's a prostitute not worth her price; he humiliates her in public and private and holds the simultaneous lure and threat of a divorce over her head, freedom if she complies with him, ruin if she doesn't. And over and over again, he browbeats her with the reminder that she only married him for his money—an accusation that Leonora protests whether she hears it sneeringly from Ohlrig or uncomprehendingly from Quinada. We never see her think of herself as a gold digger. She's reluctant to accept even a party invitation from Ohlrig's slithery factotum Franzi (Curt Bois) because it makes her feel "cheap"; she put herself through charm school on her roommate's advice, in order to equip herself with the proper graces to land a rich husband, but her daydreams remain romantic: Prince Charming discovering her at the perfume counter.2 Each stage of her attempts at self-improvement, from the aggressively socialized, self-effacing femininity of charm school to her new job as a department store model that requires her to display herself and a $4995 mink coat equally, reinforces the idea that she's a piece of interchangeable merchandise. What she wants is to be loved for herself, not the glaze of nicely mannered passivity she's been taught to put on like a beauty mark over the small mole on her cheek. But the entire weight of societal expectation is against her and the compromise she makes, in order to marry an industrial tycoon without feeling like she's sold herself, is to convince herself she's in love.
I am fascinated by the film's willingness to star a heroine this ambivalent and, for lack of a better word, implicated in the system she's trying to resist. She's more sympathetic if she's a "good" girl, isn't she? She's more realistic if she's not. And the film rewards her throughout with a sympathetic sensitivity that didn't shock me after The Reckless Moment, but still found ways to surprise me. Her marriage has wounded her in ways I don't think I've often seen depicted onscreen. There's a beautifully observed moment early in her relationship with Quinada in which he drapes the surprise overcoat he's bought for her—after she told him not to; he thought she just didn't want to be a bother—around her shoulders and she freezes utterly. It is not pleasant for her to have men buy her things. It does not make her feel like a valued colleague or even an affectionate friend; it reminds her that she's trapped in a toxic economy where she is expected to reciprocate a material down payment with her body. She knows what Quinada means by the gesture; it's a trigger all the same. That's like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) levels of unspoken attention to the small details of surviving abuse.3 And once again I can't talk about the aspect of the film that really interested me without spoilers, so proceed at your own risk as usual.
I have never before seen a Hollywood movie in which the loss of a pregnancy is a happy ending. I have never before seen a Hollywood movie—especially one made in the postwar '40's—acknowledge that far from being a blessed event and the natural fulfillment of a woman's life, a child can be nothing more than a particularly cruel form of control. A few weeks into Leonora's tenure as a receptionist, an unusually subdued Ohlrig shows up at the door of her efficiency apartment, under the rattling shadow of the elevated: he expresses dismay at her straitened circumstances, professes repentance, pleads with her to let him give her all the physical and emotional affection he denied her before. "It's not a very nice way, but it's the only way I knew . . . Let's go on [a honeymoon] tomorrow, Leonora. Let's start over again . . . We'll make everything just the way it ought to have been." Warily, she yields to his offer to take her out for a cup of coffee and the next morning finds her in the tumbled sheets of her husband's bed with the inescapable Franzi hovering over her with a breakfast tray. From him she learns that Ohlrig scheduled himself a business trip the day before he seduced her with promises of a honeymoon; he gave her the fairytale of the Beast tamed by the loss of Beauty and it was just as false as the Cinderella story they married on. She dresses and leaves without another word. Previously she treated her work indifferently; whether she admitted it to herself or not, she was marking time. Now she applies herself, acquiring office skills and medical knowledge with determined rapidity. She isn't waiting any longer for her husband's change of heart.
In hindsight of her unwelcome discovery of pregnancy, however, Ohlrig's one-night stand looks less like a misfired attempt at wooing back an alienated wife and more like a deliberate effort to entrap her. It succeeds. Knowing she doesn't have the resources to raise a child by herself—and correctly suspecting that Ohlrig will never let her do it so long as she's his wife; estranged or not, she is legally bound to him and so will be any child she bears him—Leonora returns to his mansion on Long Island, where she hopes to persuade her husband to give her a divorce. He doesn't want her, he's never wanted a child, he should just let them go . . . Instead he only tightens his hold. As Leonora huddles numbly on the stairs, Ohlrig lays out the situation with the brutal egotism that defines him:
You can have your divorce, but I get the child. That's the condition . . . You once told me you thought I was sorry from the moment we married. That's pretty mild. I hated myself for being such a fool. I never wanted you in the first place. The more you fought me, the more I began to dislike you. I think now I hate you. All I care about is breaking you, and if I have to use the child to do it, I will. You know enough about me to know that I can't stand losing—only nice people lose, and you're obviously a nice girl. All you came back for is that child and as long as you want it, you're stuck here, and that's probably for the rest of your life!
If she tries to leave him while pregnant, he'll sue her for divorce with Quinada named as co-respondent; he'll ruin her and get custody of the child. If she tries to leave him after the child is born, same. It is viciously clear that any child raised by Ohlrig alone will suffer the same merciless abuse Leonora ran from. So she stays for the sake of the unborn thing and he grinds her down with a capricious combination of neglect and harassment and disruptive late-night calls to the point where even Franzi, whose moral event horizon appeared to be infinitely extendable, finally declares, "I think I'd prefer to be a head waiter again, Mr. Ohlrig," and walks out of the millionaire's employ with the quiet parting shot: "You know, you're a big man, but not big enough to destroy that girl." It's this explicit summation of the threat Leonora poses to his masculine dominance that triggers one of Ohlrig's reliable attacks, pitching him over underneath the pinball machine he pulled down with him; the scene which follows doesn't quite match Gaslight's climactic mind games, but the shot in which a blank-faced Leonora distantly surveys her husband as he gasps for water on the floor has a chilling satisfaction. She does not bring him his pills, or water. She calls his doctor, but only after she calls hers—Quinada, to come and take her away. It's not her fault that Ohlrig's attacks are psychosomatic and he doesn't die after all. She really tried. The miscarriage follows on the stress of this confrontation.
I noticed that it never occurs to her to seek an abortion—surely Dr. Hoffman, overworked obstetrician and reliable moral compass that he is, could have recommended her someone safe, if not at that time legal. Perhaps that was a line that couldn't be crossed. But as she lies in her hospital bed and hears through the door that her premature baby has died and that Ohlrig has no hold over her anymore, wounded, exhausted, and traumatized as she is, Leonora smiles. She would have loved any child she bore, but this one was a chain and she cannot regret its breaking. I can remember encountering this kind of relief in written fiction—mostly speculative and feminist—but never in a movie. In 1949? Unthinkable. It made me incredibly happy. Her future is uncertain, but her chances are good. And if Quinada has learned anything from his involvement in this nightmare of the nuclear family, he'll give her plenty of time to heal before he so much as suggests they move in together.
I know I am shortchanging Quinada, when Mason does a very good job with his first American role and one of his rare positive leading men. It is crucial to the film that neither Ophüls nor his scriptwriter Arthur Laurents positions him as an unmitigated hero; he is Leonora's ally and would-be lover, but he's not her savior, and he has perhaps even more trouble disentangling himself from absently sexist, heteronormative habits of thought than she does. She is not rescued from one man by another. With his background playing charismatic antiheroes for Gainsborough, Mason has the ability to acknowledge the problems with Quinada while making him believably appealing. He's complicit, too, but he's trying. I'm not at all surprised that Ophüls gave him an even better part in The Reckless Moment, morally shadier and even more attractive. That's a film I recommend for Mason; this one I recommend for Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, and Ophüls' awkwardly paced but astonishing confrontation with all the things wrong with being a woman in America, in 1949 and nowadays. Since I have said nothing at all about the cinematography, which is magnificent and pointed, as effective and conspicuous as a good prose style, I leave you with Mason's last word on the subject, written after two films with the director:
I think I know the reason why
Producers tend to make him cry.
Inevitably they demand
Some stationary set-ups, and
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he'd never smile again.
This study courtesy of my steadfast backers at Patreon.
1. Ohlrig's psychiatrist is a magnificent human being played by Art Smith who is obviously not being paid enough to listen to this self-justifying Randian bullshit. Whenever he offers an insight about Ohlrig's behavior, his client dismisses him as a Freud-babbling quack. The movie spends the rest of its runtime proving that everything he said about Ohlrig was right.
2. Her roommate Maxine (Ruth Brady) is cheerfully upfront about her intent to marry for money if she gets the chance, love being an incidental but not necessary bonus. We thought she'd have done fine marrying Ohlrig and then living as a glamorous estranged wife in Paris with a stipend and a string of admirers.
3. Skygiants made some cogent points about the character of Franzi which I hope she will repeat in a post of her own, but he illustrates the complexity of the system: he is both an enabler of Ohlrig's abuse of Leonora and a victim himself. When she slaps him in a moment of uncharacteristically violent frustration and apologizes at once, he responds evenly, if a little breathlessly, "It's all right. It saves him from getting hit. That's what I get paid for." It doesn't make him a nice person, but it makes the film subtler and more like the world it's representing, where the patriarchy lets very few people off lightly.
skygiants to watch Max Ophüls' Caught (1949), the first of his two American films noirs. It's not as complex or as coherent a picture as its follow-up The Reckless Moment (1949), which stunned me in May, but it's a striking, strange, surprisingly blunt examination of the ways in which a woman can be trapped and bound by social conventions, constructions of gender, her own body and the laws which govern it. Much of it is still all too relevant and recognizable today, and I don't say that just because the film opens with two roommates morosely totaling their limited finances and complaining about the humidity.At first the story looks like a simple cautionary tale: the terrifying ease with which a Cinderella romance can turn into a Bluebeard marriage. Despite his brusque manner and his contemptuous affections, ex-carhop and recent charm school graduate Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) allows herself to accept a proposal of marriage from high-powered businessman Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), because he's worth ninety million and how do you say no to that? No sooner are the wedding headlines yesterday's news than the reality of Leonora's situation sets in: her husband is a chilly, controlling, volatile man who gets his philosophy straight from Ayn Rand; he views every interaction as a transaction and despises his wife for marrying him, because her acquiescence only proves that he met her asking price. He only married her to spite his psychiatrist.1 Very sensibly, she flees Ohlrig's cavernous rococo mansion and takes a job as a receptionist in an East Side clinic where she forms a friendship with unfazeable obstetrician Dr. Hoffman (Frank Ferguson) and something closer with his partner Dr. Larry Quinada (James Mason), an idealistic dropout from the upper middle class still figuring out what a bedside manner looks like. "I'm a very good textbook doctor," he admits after his underestimation of an anxious mother risks a child's life; he's tactless and prone to mansplaining, but we are encouraged to view him sympathetically in part because the film consistently calls him on it and he actually learns. He's the obvious romantic hero. He can't quite understand why Leonora is shy of him, especially when the mutual attraction is as plain as the smile on her face. Inevitably he proposes to her, but she's still married to Ohlrig and there's an additional catch . . .
This is almost exactly the two-thirds mark of the film, by which point it had taken several turns neither of us was expecting. I wasn't even expecting the main characters, honestly. Turn the trope kaleidoscope a little and Smith Ohlrig could be the alpha hero of a billionaire romance, wealthy, workaholic, control-freakish and ultimately vulnerable—but he exists in the real world, and so he's an abusive asshole. He gives a touching speech about the hardship of his upbringing in which we learn that his father only left him four million, he had to bootstrap the rest: "I didn't drink it away, I didn't gamble it away, I didn't marry it away . . . That's what everyone wants, isn't it? Well, I've got it. And I made it myself." When he can't get what he wants by social leverage or main force of money, he suffers apparent life-threatening nervous attacks that he attributes to "a bad heart." The aptness of his words bypasses him completely. He needs either to own people or destroy them. As Skygiants pointed out, the film is a primer on the ways in which a relationship can be abusive without physical violence. Ohlrig never lays a hand on Leonora. He doesn't need to, when he controls her finances and her social access. He calls his wife his highest-paid employee, treats her as if she's a prostitute not worth her price; he humiliates her in public and private and holds the simultaneous lure and threat of a divorce over her head, freedom if she complies with him, ruin if she doesn't. And over and over again, he browbeats her with the reminder that she only married him for his money—an accusation that Leonora protests whether she hears it sneeringly from Ohlrig or uncomprehendingly from Quinada. We never see her think of herself as a gold digger. She's reluctant to accept even a party invitation from Ohlrig's slithery factotum Franzi (Curt Bois) because it makes her feel "cheap"; she put herself through charm school on her roommate's advice, in order to equip herself with the proper graces to land a rich husband, but her daydreams remain romantic: Prince Charming discovering her at the perfume counter.2 Each stage of her attempts at self-improvement, from the aggressively socialized, self-effacing femininity of charm school to her new job as a department store model that requires her to display herself and a $4995 mink coat equally, reinforces the idea that she's a piece of interchangeable merchandise. What she wants is to be loved for herself, not the glaze of nicely mannered passivity she's been taught to put on like a beauty mark over the small mole on her cheek. But the entire weight of societal expectation is against her and the compromise she makes, in order to marry an industrial tycoon without feeling like she's sold herself, is to convince herself she's in love.
I am fascinated by the film's willingness to star a heroine this ambivalent and, for lack of a better word, implicated in the system she's trying to resist. She's more sympathetic if she's a "good" girl, isn't she? She's more realistic if she's not. And the film rewards her throughout with a sympathetic sensitivity that didn't shock me after The Reckless Moment, but still found ways to surprise me. Her marriage has wounded her in ways I don't think I've often seen depicted onscreen. There's a beautifully observed moment early in her relationship with Quinada in which he drapes the surprise overcoat he's bought for her—after she told him not to; he thought she just didn't want to be a bother—around her shoulders and she freezes utterly. It is not pleasant for her to have men buy her things. It does not make her feel like a valued colleague or even an affectionate friend; it reminds her that she's trapped in a toxic economy where she is expected to reciprocate a material down payment with her body. She knows what Quinada means by the gesture; it's a trigger all the same. That's like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) levels of unspoken attention to the small details of surviving abuse.3 And once again I can't talk about the aspect of the film that really interested me without spoilers, so proceed at your own risk as usual.
I have never before seen a Hollywood movie in which the loss of a pregnancy is a happy ending. I have never before seen a Hollywood movie—especially one made in the postwar '40's—acknowledge that far from being a blessed event and the natural fulfillment of a woman's life, a child can be nothing more than a particularly cruel form of control. A few weeks into Leonora's tenure as a receptionist, an unusually subdued Ohlrig shows up at the door of her efficiency apartment, under the rattling shadow of the elevated: he expresses dismay at her straitened circumstances, professes repentance, pleads with her to let him give her all the physical and emotional affection he denied her before. "It's not a very nice way, but it's the only way I knew . . . Let's go on [a honeymoon] tomorrow, Leonora. Let's start over again . . . We'll make everything just the way it ought to have been." Warily, she yields to his offer to take her out for a cup of coffee and the next morning finds her in the tumbled sheets of her husband's bed with the inescapable Franzi hovering over her with a breakfast tray. From him she learns that Ohlrig scheduled himself a business trip the day before he seduced her with promises of a honeymoon; he gave her the fairytale of the Beast tamed by the loss of Beauty and it was just as false as the Cinderella story they married on. She dresses and leaves without another word. Previously she treated her work indifferently; whether she admitted it to herself or not, she was marking time. Now she applies herself, acquiring office skills and medical knowledge with determined rapidity. She isn't waiting any longer for her husband's change of heart.
In hindsight of her unwelcome discovery of pregnancy, however, Ohlrig's one-night stand looks less like a misfired attempt at wooing back an alienated wife and more like a deliberate effort to entrap her. It succeeds. Knowing she doesn't have the resources to raise a child by herself—and correctly suspecting that Ohlrig will never let her do it so long as she's his wife; estranged or not, she is legally bound to him and so will be any child she bears him—Leonora returns to his mansion on Long Island, where she hopes to persuade her husband to give her a divorce. He doesn't want her, he's never wanted a child, he should just let them go . . . Instead he only tightens his hold. As Leonora huddles numbly on the stairs, Ohlrig lays out the situation with the brutal egotism that defines him:
You can have your divorce, but I get the child. That's the condition . . . You once told me you thought I was sorry from the moment we married. That's pretty mild. I hated myself for being such a fool. I never wanted you in the first place. The more you fought me, the more I began to dislike you. I think now I hate you. All I care about is breaking you, and if I have to use the child to do it, I will. You know enough about me to know that I can't stand losing—only nice people lose, and you're obviously a nice girl. All you came back for is that child and as long as you want it, you're stuck here, and that's probably for the rest of your life!
If she tries to leave him while pregnant, he'll sue her for divorce with Quinada named as co-respondent; he'll ruin her and get custody of the child. If she tries to leave him after the child is born, same. It is viciously clear that any child raised by Ohlrig alone will suffer the same merciless abuse Leonora ran from. So she stays for the sake of the unborn thing and he grinds her down with a capricious combination of neglect and harassment and disruptive late-night calls to the point where even Franzi, whose moral event horizon appeared to be infinitely extendable, finally declares, "I think I'd prefer to be a head waiter again, Mr. Ohlrig," and walks out of the millionaire's employ with the quiet parting shot: "You know, you're a big man, but not big enough to destroy that girl." It's this explicit summation of the threat Leonora poses to his masculine dominance that triggers one of Ohlrig's reliable attacks, pitching him over underneath the pinball machine he pulled down with him; the scene which follows doesn't quite match Gaslight's climactic mind games, but the shot in which a blank-faced Leonora distantly surveys her husband as he gasps for water on the floor has a chilling satisfaction. She does not bring him his pills, or water. She calls his doctor, but only after she calls hers—Quinada, to come and take her away. It's not her fault that Ohlrig's attacks are psychosomatic and he doesn't die after all. She really tried. The miscarriage follows on the stress of this confrontation.
I noticed that it never occurs to her to seek an abortion—surely Dr. Hoffman, overworked obstetrician and reliable moral compass that he is, could have recommended her someone safe, if not at that time legal. Perhaps that was a line that couldn't be crossed. But as she lies in her hospital bed and hears through the door that her premature baby has died and that Ohlrig has no hold over her anymore, wounded, exhausted, and traumatized as she is, Leonora smiles. She would have loved any child she bore, but this one was a chain and she cannot regret its breaking. I can remember encountering this kind of relief in written fiction—mostly speculative and feminist—but never in a movie. In 1949? Unthinkable. It made me incredibly happy. Her future is uncertain, but her chances are good. And if Quinada has learned anything from his involvement in this nightmare of the nuclear family, he'll give her plenty of time to heal before he so much as suggests they move in together.
I know I am shortchanging Quinada, when Mason does a very good job with his first American role and one of his rare positive leading men. It is crucial to the film that neither Ophüls nor his scriptwriter Arthur Laurents positions him as an unmitigated hero; he is Leonora's ally and would-be lover, but he's not her savior, and he has perhaps even more trouble disentangling himself from absently sexist, heteronormative habits of thought than she does. She is not rescued from one man by another. With his background playing charismatic antiheroes for Gainsborough, Mason has the ability to acknowledge the problems with Quinada while making him believably appealing. He's complicit, too, but he's trying. I'm not at all surprised that Ophüls gave him an even better part in The Reckless Moment, morally shadier and even more attractive. That's a film I recommend for Mason; this one I recommend for Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, and Ophüls' awkwardly paced but astonishing confrontation with all the things wrong with being a woman in America, in 1949 and nowadays. Since I have said nothing at all about the cinematography, which is magnificent and pointed, as effective and conspicuous as a good prose style, I leave you with Mason's last word on the subject, written after two films with the director:
I think I know the reason why
Producers tend to make him cry.
Inevitably they demand
Some stationary set-ups, and
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he'd never smile again.
This study courtesy of my steadfast backers at Patreon.
1. Ohlrig's psychiatrist is a magnificent human being played by Art Smith who is obviously not being paid enough to listen to this self-justifying Randian bullshit. Whenever he offers an insight about Ohlrig's behavior, his client dismisses him as a Freud-babbling quack. The movie spends the rest of its runtime proving that everything he said about Ohlrig was right.
2. Her roommate Maxine (Ruth Brady) is cheerfully upfront about her intent to marry for money if she gets the chance, love being an incidental but not necessary bonus. We thought she'd have done fine marrying Ohlrig and then living as a glamorous estranged wife in Paris with a stipend and a string of admirers.
3. Skygiants made some cogent points about the character of Franzi which I hope she will repeat in a post of her own, but he illustrates the complexity of the system: he is both an enabler of Ohlrig's abuse of Leonora and a victim himself. When she slaps him in a moment of uncharacteristically violent frustration and apologizes at once, he responds evenly, if a little breathlessly, "It's all right. It saves him from getting hit. That's what I get paid for." It doesn't make him a nice person, but it makes the film subtler and more like the world it's representing, where the patriarchy lets very few people off lightly.
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It was mentioned in the Arthur Laurents interview I read this afternoon! I was deeply impressed!
I also don't know why it's so funny to me, but man, what a revenge fic!
No, it's actually funny. Especially since Ryan and Bel Geddes were both under contract at RKO at the time—which Hughes had taken over in 1948—and in order to get them cast in an Enterprise picture, someone had to send him a copy of the script for approval.
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I don't think Dr. Hoffman could have advised an abortion even while sympathetic towards Leonora. The Hays Code probably prevented it from one direction; Hoffman as Gallant to Quinada's Goofus suggests he would have been following a similar moral code. (Did Quinada ever know Leonora was pregnant?)
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Agreed. It's amazing.
(Did Quinada ever know Leonora was pregnant?)
Yes; he finds out from Leonora after he tracks her down at Ohlrig's mansion. Given the impractical fanciness of her clothes when she first applied for the job and her throwaway line about once being "sort of a paid companion to someone very rich," he concludes not inaccurately that she was a wealthy man's kept woman; when she vanishes after discovering her pregnancy (about which Hoffman does not tell Quinada, Leonora having asked him not to—I really appreciate that Hoffman's priorities are what his female patients want), he searches all the estates on Long Island until he finds the one that contains a Leonora Eames. He learns from Ohlrig that she's married, from Leonora that she's pregnant with Ohlrig's child. Being his usual well-intentioned but emotionally obtuse self, he tries to persuade Leonora to come away with him then and there: he frames it as a choice between money and love, not recognizing that it isn't the lure of a gilded cage that's holding her but fear of what Ohlrig will do if she walks. She doesn't answer and he leaves: "If you make up your mind, you can always call." By the time she finally does call him, he's gotten his act together enough to say absolutely nothing about money or security or romance as he sits beside her in the ambulance, only how important it is that she want to live through what Ohlrig has done to her, because she can and she deserves to: "He can't hold you anymore, he won't even want to . . . You can be happy, darling. That's why I want you to hear me." We thought Hoffman might have chewed him out when he got back to the office the last time. Larry, you said what to her?
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It's right out there in the text! I have no idea how they did it. I'm sure there were other compromises that had to be made to the Breen office, but there's so much else that looks as though it's just ignoring the existence of the Production Code, full steam ahead. When I described it to my father, he thought it was pre-Code. I couldn't blame him.
(Unlike The Reckless Moment, Caught is available on DVD, so there's a chance of people seeing it sometime soon.)
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So according to an interview I found with Arthur Laurents, the awkwardness of the pacing and some of the roughness around the edges of the film can be attributed to the fact that right as filming was about to begin, Ophüls came down with shingles: he was replaced as director by John Berry, who, Laurents explains, was a misogynist jerk and interpreted the character of Leonora as a gold-digging tramp who gets what's coming to her. Ophüls got better, got back to the set after twelve days of shooting, saw Berry's footage, threw it all out and started from scratch. Laurents claims they had four days left to reshoot twelve days of material, including script rewrites to cover location scenes which there was now neither the time nor the budget to recreate. Double-checking with a biography of Ophüls indicates that Laurents exaggerated the timeline slightly: they had five days. No wonder it's not as polished as The Reckless Moment. I'm impressed it's as coherent as it is. Whatever its problems, Caught doesn't look like a down-to-the-wire production that was being rewritten even as it was being filmed, and it gets its point across with an inspiring disregard for the strictures of the Production Code.
I love the poem. I can hear it in Mason's voice, too, which is ridiculously endearing. He's an actor I really like and it's nice to know I have reasons to feel the same way about him as a person.
[edit] I know little about Mason's personal life; I just fell down Wikipedia. His son worked for Reagan and his grandson is a queer rights activist. One of these things confuses me, but the other one is awesome.
no subject
. . .
O_O
. . . seriously, I'm still just -- what -- FIVE DAYS???
It's a miracle that they wound up with a movie at all. Thank god Ophüls recovered in time.
Lurking with great appreciation
(I have never seen this movie and now I must, though I suspect it will harder to watch than your review was to read. That poem made me giggle).
Re: Lurking with great appreciation
Thank you so much for taking the time to delurk and leave this comment. I do not have a graceful way to say that I am glad that you find the things that interest me interesting, but I am. It is especially important for me to hear at a point when my brain feels like a blank screen to me, and I appreciate it. And it actually just does make me happy to know that other people enjoy Etruscan art as much as I do. Satyrs, mirrors, Vanth.
(I have never seen this movie and now I must, though I suspect it will harder to watch than your review was to read. That poem made me giggle).
There are some scenes in Caught that are difficult to watch. Most of them feature Smith Ohlrig.
I seriously think that poem was the cutest thing James Mason ever wrote.
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I recommend it! It's rougher than The Reckless Moment, but see above to
I'm a huge fan of James Mason, but Robert Ryan is one of my favorite players of villains.
I'm really not sure what I've seen him in that isn't Crossfire (1947), Caught, and The Wild Bunch (1969), the latter of which gives him a very sympathetic part. I feel like I should recognize him from other movies, but I worry I'm confusing him with Richard Conte or someone. What do you like him in?
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It's a great title!