I know nobody reads LJ on a Saturday morning, but I just got sucker-punched by a movie and I need to talk about it.
The movie in question: The Reckless Moment (1949), an apparently obscure and devastating feminist film noir starring Joan Bennett and James Mason. Directed by Max Ophüls from the novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, The Blank Wall (1947). I started watching because I'd never heard of it. I recognized the source material during the title credits because![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants had mentioned the book within the last year. I texted ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel afterward: "Actually devastating. Like Brief Encounter (1945) with more irony and crime. I cried onto my movie cat. I might have to make tea." TCM's technically accurate but completely unhelpful one-line summary did not mention the patriarchy.
The film's relentless focus is Lucia Harper (Bennett), an all-American white suburban housewife whose life goes, like that of so many noir protagonists, from zero to nightmare overnight. It's the week before Christmas in Balboa, California; her engineer husband is overseas in Berlin, her son is a thirteen-year-old dynamo of self-absorption, her retired father-in-law is genially irresponsible, and her daughter is a seventeen-year-old art student carrying on a self-consciously adult affair with a middle-aged sleaze. The film opens cold with Lucia's trip to Los Angeles to confront her daughter's lover, insinuating "ex-art dealer" Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick, a lizard without a lounge), who agrees to stay away from the girl only if her mother makes it worth his while. Predictably, a scornful, mutinous Bea (Geraldine Brooks) does not believe the conversation when it's faithfully reported to her; she keeps her tryst with Darby in the family's boathouse that night, only to bash him over the head with a heavy kitchen flashlight and flee in loathing when he not only admits to the extortion scheme ("As a matter of fact, Bea, I am desperate for money") but pushes her to take advantage of it with him. Stunned and dizzy, he stumbles after her in the sea-wind darkness, collapses through the railing of the weathered boardwalk . . . Up early the next morning after a sleepless night, Lucia wanders down to the water and discovers none other than Darby, open-eyed, quite dead, impaled on the anchor where he fell. She saw the splintered lens of the flashlight last night. She's alone on the beach: it's just after dawn: she has split seconds to think. In her scarf and her sunglasses and her long light tweed coat, she wrestles the body into her family's motorboat—not forgetting the incriminating anchor—and dumps the one in a coastal swamp and the other in Newport Bay. And then she goes home, hoping that's the end of it.
It's not, of course. The next day there's a name she knows in the papers and a man waiting in the living room to see Mrs. Harper. His name is Martin Donnelly (Mason), a tall dark stranger in a black overcoat with a curiously apologetic expression and a tired Irish voice; he's a blackmailer and he wants five thousand dollars for all the love letters Bea wrote to Darby. (Conclusively proving sleazehood of Herculean proportions, Darby put them up as collateral for a loan. Accepting them was a courtesy while he was alive; now that he's the center of a murder investigation, they're really worth something.) Lucia protests honestly that she doesn't have that kind of money and can't raise it with her husband out of town, especially not over Christmas weekend. Martin insists, reluctantly but grimly. He has a partner, Nagle, who usually handles blackmail cases. She really doesn't want to be dealing with Nagle. She can have until Wednesday. She'll get the money somehow. She has her family to think of.
It is impossible to discuss anything that makes this film interesting without further spoilers, so consider yourself warned. ( We're all involved with each other, one way or another. )
So on the bright side, I've been reassured that good movies were made during the era of the Production Code.
On the down side, I'm still awake. This exorcism sponsored by my kind backers at Patreon.
The movie in question: The Reckless Moment (1949), an apparently obscure and devastating feminist film noir starring Joan Bennett and James Mason. Directed by Max Ophüls from the novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, The Blank Wall (1947). I started watching because I'd never heard of it. I recognized the source material during the title credits because
skygiants had mentioned the book within the last year. I texted derspatchel afterward: "Actually devastating. Like Brief Encounter (1945) with more irony and crime. I cried onto my movie cat. I might have to make tea." TCM's technically accurate but completely unhelpful one-line summary did not mention the patriarchy.The film's relentless focus is Lucia Harper (Bennett), an all-American white suburban housewife whose life goes, like that of so many noir protagonists, from zero to nightmare overnight. It's the week before Christmas in Balboa, California; her engineer husband is overseas in Berlin, her son is a thirteen-year-old dynamo of self-absorption, her retired father-in-law is genially irresponsible, and her daughter is a seventeen-year-old art student carrying on a self-consciously adult affair with a middle-aged sleaze. The film opens cold with Lucia's trip to Los Angeles to confront her daughter's lover, insinuating "ex-art dealer" Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick, a lizard without a lounge), who agrees to stay away from the girl only if her mother makes it worth his while. Predictably, a scornful, mutinous Bea (Geraldine Brooks) does not believe the conversation when it's faithfully reported to her; she keeps her tryst with Darby in the family's boathouse that night, only to bash him over the head with a heavy kitchen flashlight and flee in loathing when he not only admits to the extortion scheme ("As a matter of fact, Bea, I am desperate for money") but pushes her to take advantage of it with him. Stunned and dizzy, he stumbles after her in the sea-wind darkness, collapses through the railing of the weathered boardwalk . . . Up early the next morning after a sleepless night, Lucia wanders down to the water and discovers none other than Darby, open-eyed, quite dead, impaled on the anchor where he fell. She saw the splintered lens of the flashlight last night. She's alone on the beach: it's just after dawn: she has split seconds to think. In her scarf and her sunglasses and her long light tweed coat, she wrestles the body into her family's motorboat—not forgetting the incriminating anchor—and dumps the one in a coastal swamp and the other in Newport Bay. And then she goes home, hoping that's the end of it.
It's not, of course. The next day there's a name she knows in the papers and a man waiting in the living room to see Mrs. Harper. His name is Martin Donnelly (Mason), a tall dark stranger in a black overcoat with a curiously apologetic expression and a tired Irish voice; he's a blackmailer and he wants five thousand dollars for all the love letters Bea wrote to Darby. (Conclusively proving sleazehood of Herculean proportions, Darby put them up as collateral for a loan. Accepting them was a courtesy while he was alive; now that he's the center of a murder investigation, they're really worth something.) Lucia protests honestly that she doesn't have that kind of money and can't raise it with her husband out of town, especially not over Christmas weekend. Martin insists, reluctantly but grimly. He has a partner, Nagle, who usually handles blackmail cases. She really doesn't want to be dealing with Nagle. She can have until Wednesday. She'll get the money somehow. She has her family to think of.
It is impossible to discuss anything that makes this film interesting without further spoilers, so consider yourself warned. ( We're all involved with each other, one way or another. )
So on the bright side, I've been reassured that good movies were made during the era of the Production Code.
On the down side, I'm still awake. This exorcism sponsored by my kind backers at Patreon.
