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You don't know how a family can surround you at times
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.
There's the heart of the story, Lucia and Martin and Lucia's family. Their relationship is unlike anything I have seen in a film noir. Lucia is unlike anyone I have seen in a film noir. A conventional housewife blackmailed with the exposure of her daughter's sexual entanglement in a murder case—though the blackmailer doesn't know it, with her own complicity in its cover-up—we should expect her to react with helplessness, horror, denial. But we saw her in that first scene, coolly taking Darby's measure by the openness of his contempt. She assesses and assimilates the reality of Martin Donnelly as briskly and unsentimentally as she has any of the other thankless responsibilities that structure her life; when her blackmailer insists on taking her for a drive so that they can talk freely, she has him drive her to the drugstore so that she can make a call she doesn't want her family to overhear, either.1 She is a fearsomely efficient person. She is always taking care of something. There is always something to take care of. Her family never gives her a moment to herself and we see the effects at once. Her conversation is frequently snappish, brusque, repressive; she reads in many ways as a woman who is deeply angry, but doesn't know what about or perhaps even that she is. She chain-smokes with such brittle fervor that Martin, rebuffed after expressing concern about her health, buys her a cigarette holder with a nicotine-reducing filter as an early Christmas present, a chiding, affectionate, utterly inappropriate gift. It's not that she doesn't love her family. However needy and hectoring, her children are her children and the prospect of one of them being an inadvertent murderer (a misconception that the film never clarifies for Lucia, interestingly) calls out a response so absolutely protective that she's prepared not only to tamper with evidence, but to confess falsely rather than see a distraught, guilt-sick Bea dragged into the papers and courts as a suspect. But she does not and cannot wear that kind of love lightly, and Martin is perhaps the first person in her life who notices. "Do you never get away from your family?" he asks as they drive, the question occasioned by passing the amusement park where her son worked last summer. Her answer is clear and deliberately dispassionate: "No." Later, she brushes off his sympathetic compliment—"She's lucky to have a mother like you"—with her usual irritable distraction: "Everyone has a mother like me," as if what she does is nothing special. The worst part is, she's right. She is doing exactly what is expected of a wife and mother in her place and time—all-nurturing, all-providing, all-sacrificing, and always looking good while she does it—and the fact that it's grinding her down like sandstone is neither here nor there. Except to Martin, asking with that same compassionate impropriety: "You are a prisoner, aren't you?" Answering that she doesn't feel like one is not the same as refuting the allegation. So the bond grows between them.
It's not that she wants to run away and become his moll instead of Tom Harper's wife. The film is actually scrupulous in its avoidance of the standard romantic alternatives. The quality Martin brings into her life is less familiar—honesty, maybe, or humanity. He doesn't talk to her like the little woman, or the accustomed source of chocolate cake and allowances, or an unconditional combination of punching bag and cleanup crew; he doesn't talk to her in terms of her family at all, except insofar as he recognizes the strength of her devotion to them: it is at once his hold over her and a source of deep and painful envy for him. With unnerving ease, they fall into a quasi-familial, quasi-romantic routine—he carries her shopping, lends her change for a call, gives her father racing tips and helps her son out with his fixer-upper jalopy; nobody questions seeing him around town because he is so clearly with Mrs. Harper, as if he were a kind of inevitable substitute husband in the absence of the real thing—but the attraction he holds for her is that he is outside of all these patterns, no matter what they look like. He's not her husband. He's not her lover. He's not a colleague of her husband's, or a friend of her father's, or the husband of one of her friends, or any of the roles in which a man relates to a woman in her world. He's the man who's blackmailing her and feels bad about it. Naturally, the attraction she holds for him is the reverse. She exemplifies a world he has never been part of, a charmed circle, domestic and fragile, and because she's half killing herself to keep it safe, he wants to protect it, too. All unasked, he becomes her knight in tarnished armor, battling his brutal partner,2 sacrificing himself like Sydney Carton to keep a life she loves beside her, taking onto himself the weight of a murder he didn't commit as well as the one he did in outright defense of her. He makes himself her scapegoat. He isn't trying to crack up the car when he flees with Nagle's body, so that it won't be found in the Harper boathouse any more than Darby's body was found on their beach,3 but a crash suits his purposes even better than a disappearance.
And so he dies like a champion for his lady, redeeming her honor with the last lie of his life, but was it his one good deed or just another self-delusion? The last scene finds Lucia for once alone—in the dark of her bedroom, face-down and weeping, exhausted, finally overwhelmed, and grieving. The phone rings; it's her husband, calling back from Berlin. She descends the stairs numbly; hears from the excited chatter of her children that the man in the car crash—Martin—confessed to Darby's murder before he died; takes the phone and begins in a light bright voice to tell her husband about the holiday. "We've mailed your Christmas packages. We're going to have a blue Christmas tree. Everything's fine except we miss you terribly. Yes, Tom . . ." American postwar domesticity, ladies and gents, the real thing, accept no substitutes, pure as the Saturday Evening Post. The shadows of the banisters close around Lucia's face like prison bars and she's still crying. That beloved security of family that Martin envied and gave his life to return to her safely is the trap she'll never get out of and she knows it now. Merry Christmas! Holy fuck.
I am amazed The Reckless Moment was made in 1949. It has the unhappiest ending of any film I've seen from that year and I am counting The Heiress. My only mental fix-it is second-wave feminism.
1. Martin peering around counters at customers' packages, inspecting an artificial Christmas tree, at once amused and bemused by SoCal consumer culture is just one excellent component of a scene I really wish had the cinematographic vocabulary to analyze: when the operator interrupts Lucia's long-distance call to the aunt she hopes can give Bea a few days out of town on Lake Tahoe, a single elastic shot tracks Lucia all the way through the drugstore as she goes to borrow another five minutes' change from her blackmailer at the front door and then back to the phone booth again, Martin almost inadvertently trailing in her wake. It's a direct, wordless illustration of the already complex affinity between them, simultaneously deceptive and revealing. They're not the mutually trusting, normally stressed couple they seem, just another pair of friends running pre-Christmas errands together, but give them a few days and they might be. It's a necessary component of the tragedy, after all.
2. Lucia doubts his existence for most of the film, suspecting instead a good-cop-bad-cop angle that Martin's trying to run on her, but Nagle is quite real, played by ubiquitous character actor Roy Roberts, and he doesn't have an ounce of romanticism in his dry pitiless smile. His relationship with Martin is a fascinating, just-sketched corner of the film—the way he uses the younger man's regrets and fragmentary but still functional sense of ethics to leash him to the underworld, co-opting out loud the self-destructive inner voice that continually reminds him that he's a petty crook and he'll never deserve anything better, so he'd better not try. "This lady's not in your class . . . You're not respectable, Martin. Relax."
3. A decision explicitly mirroring Lucia's initial impulsive move to protect her daughter by disposing of an inconvenient body, her eponymous "reckless moment": Martin's sacrifice is just as altruistic and just as poorly thought through.
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.
There's the heart of the story, Lucia and Martin and Lucia's family. Their relationship is unlike anything I have seen in a film noir. Lucia is unlike anyone I have seen in a film noir. A conventional housewife blackmailed with the exposure of her daughter's sexual entanglement in a murder case—though the blackmailer doesn't know it, with her own complicity in its cover-up—we should expect her to react with helplessness, horror, denial. But we saw her in that first scene, coolly taking Darby's measure by the openness of his contempt. She assesses and assimilates the reality of Martin Donnelly as briskly and unsentimentally as she has any of the other thankless responsibilities that structure her life; when her blackmailer insists on taking her for a drive so that they can talk freely, she has him drive her to the drugstore so that she can make a call she doesn't want her family to overhear, either.1 She is a fearsomely efficient person. She is always taking care of something. There is always something to take care of. Her family never gives her a moment to herself and we see the effects at once. Her conversation is frequently snappish, brusque, repressive; she reads in many ways as a woman who is deeply angry, but doesn't know what about or perhaps even that she is. She chain-smokes with such brittle fervor that Martin, rebuffed after expressing concern about her health, buys her a cigarette holder with a nicotine-reducing filter as an early Christmas present, a chiding, affectionate, utterly inappropriate gift. It's not that she doesn't love her family. However needy and hectoring, her children are her children and the prospect of one of them being an inadvertent murderer (a misconception that the film never clarifies for Lucia, interestingly) calls out a response so absolutely protective that she's prepared not only to tamper with evidence, but to confess falsely rather than see a distraught, guilt-sick Bea dragged into the papers and courts as a suspect. But she does not and cannot wear that kind of love lightly, and Martin is perhaps the first person in her life who notices. "Do you never get away from your family?" he asks as they drive, the question occasioned by passing the amusement park where her son worked last summer. Her answer is clear and deliberately dispassionate: "No." Later, she brushes off his sympathetic compliment—"She's lucky to have a mother like you"—with her usual irritable distraction: "Everyone has a mother like me," as if what she does is nothing special. The worst part is, she's right. She is doing exactly what is expected of a wife and mother in her place and time—all-nurturing, all-providing, all-sacrificing, and always looking good while she does it—and the fact that it's grinding her down like sandstone is neither here nor there. Except to Martin, asking with that same compassionate impropriety: "You are a prisoner, aren't you?" Answering that she doesn't feel like one is not the same as refuting the allegation. So the bond grows between them.
It's not that she wants to run away and become his moll instead of Tom Harper's wife. The film is actually scrupulous in its avoidance of the standard romantic alternatives. The quality Martin brings into her life is less familiar—honesty, maybe, or humanity. He doesn't talk to her like the little woman, or the accustomed source of chocolate cake and allowances, or an unconditional combination of punching bag and cleanup crew; he doesn't talk to her in terms of her family at all, except insofar as he recognizes the strength of her devotion to them: it is at once his hold over her and a source of deep and painful envy for him. With unnerving ease, they fall into a quasi-familial, quasi-romantic routine—he carries her shopping, lends her change for a call, gives her father racing tips and helps her son out with his fixer-upper jalopy; nobody questions seeing him around town because he is so clearly with Mrs. Harper, as if he were a kind of inevitable substitute husband in the absence of the real thing—but the attraction he holds for her is that he is outside of all these patterns, no matter what they look like. He's not her husband. He's not her lover. He's not a colleague of her husband's, or a friend of her father's, or the husband of one of her friends, or any of the roles in which a man relates to a woman in her world. He's the man who's blackmailing her and feels bad about it. Naturally, the attraction she holds for him is the reverse. She exemplifies a world he has never been part of, a charmed circle, domestic and fragile, and because she's half killing herself to keep it safe, he wants to protect it, too. All unasked, he becomes her knight in tarnished armor, battling his brutal partner,2 sacrificing himself like Sydney Carton to keep a life she loves beside her, taking onto himself the weight of a murder he didn't commit as well as the one he did in outright defense of her. He makes himself her scapegoat. He isn't trying to crack up the car when he flees with Nagle's body, so that it won't be found in the Harper boathouse any more than Darby's body was found on their beach,3 but a crash suits his purposes even better than a disappearance.
And so he dies like a champion for his lady, redeeming her honor with the last lie of his life, but was it his one good deed or just another self-delusion? The last scene finds Lucia for once alone—in the dark of her bedroom, face-down and weeping, exhausted, finally overwhelmed, and grieving. The phone rings; it's her husband, calling back from Berlin. She descends the stairs numbly; hears from the excited chatter of her children that the man in the car crash—Martin—confessed to Darby's murder before he died; takes the phone and begins in a light bright voice to tell her husband about the holiday. "We've mailed your Christmas packages. We're going to have a blue Christmas tree. Everything's fine except we miss you terribly. Yes, Tom . . ." American postwar domesticity, ladies and gents, the real thing, accept no substitutes, pure as the Saturday Evening Post. The shadows of the banisters close around Lucia's face like prison bars and she's still crying. That beloved security of family that Martin envied and gave his life to return to her safely is the trap she'll never get out of and she knows it now. Merry Christmas! Holy fuck.
I am amazed The Reckless Moment was made in 1949. It has the unhappiest ending of any film I've seen from that year and I am counting The Heiress. My only mental fix-it is second-wave feminism.
1. Martin peering around counters at customers' packages, inspecting an artificial Christmas tree, at once amused and bemused by SoCal consumer culture is just one excellent component of a scene I really wish had the cinematographic vocabulary to analyze: when the operator interrupts Lucia's long-distance call to the aunt she hopes can give Bea a few days out of town on Lake Tahoe, a single elastic shot tracks Lucia all the way through the drugstore as she goes to borrow another five minutes' change from her blackmailer at the front door and then back to the phone booth again, Martin almost inadvertently trailing in her wake. It's a direct, wordless illustration of the already complex affinity between them, simultaneously deceptive and revealing. They're not the mutually trusting, normally stressed couple they seem, just another pair of friends running pre-Christmas errands together, but give them a few days and they might be. It's a necessary component of the tragedy, after all.
2. Lucia doubts his existence for most of the film, suspecting instead a good-cop-bad-cop angle that Martin's trying to run on her, but Nagle is quite real, played by ubiquitous character actor Roy Roberts, and he doesn't have an ounce of romanticism in his dry pitiless smile. His relationship with Martin is a fascinating, just-sketched corner of the film—the way he uses the younger man's regrets and fragmentary but still functional sense of ethics to leash him to the underworld, co-opting out loud the self-destructive inner voice that continually reminds him that he's a petty crook and he'll never deserve anything better, so he'd better not try. "This lady's not in your class . . . You're not respectable, Martin. Relax."
3. A decision explicitly mirroring Lucia's initial impulsive move to protect her daughter by disposing of an inconvenient body, her eponymous "reckless moment": Martin's sacrifice is just as altruistic and just as poorly thought through.
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.
no subject
May I ask? I'll be looking for the book from now on, but that doesn't do me much good right now.
I'm curious: is her housekeeper in the film at all?
Yes; the Harpers have a housekeeper named Sybil (Frances E. Williams). She's a few years older than Lucia, so just on the other side of forty; she does a lot of the cleaning and some of the cooking, although not so much that Lucia isn't stressing about Christmas dinner; I had difficulty telling whether she lived with the family or just showed up early in the morning every day. I suspect her role of being much reduced from the book. She plays a curious, mostly watchful part in the story until the very end. She knows something's going on. She's framed in the background of shots, observing; she's not party to the details, but she can tell that something is eating Lucia and that soft-spoken Martin is not what he seems. And she keeps trying to help. Never overtly, but she's the person within the household who tries to persuade Lucia to eat something or to sit down for five minutes instead of rushing from one errand to the next; more than once she asks Lucia if she wants company. Lucia always refuses. It doesn't looks like it's because Sybil's the one offering. Their relationship is sympathetic, if not demonstrative. (Early on, Bea is high-handed and petulant with Sybil, demanding her blouse ironed when Sybil is very obviously in the middle of housework; Lucia snaps at her instantly, "Bea, you're not to talk like that to Sybil!" and then, as if apologizing, "Sybil, you don't have to do the downstairs today." Sybil promptly knocks off the vacuuming and goes and does something the camera doesn't follow. Opüls is aware she has an interior life; we just don't get access to almost any of it.) The thought of anyone being able to help her seems as foreign to Lucia as the idea that his presence might benefit anyone is to Martin. It's not until things have gone critical that she finally accepts Sybil's offer: seeing that a wounded Martin has fled with dead Nagle, she takes the car to go after him and this time she cannot dissuade Sybil from coming along. As they drive steadily and slightly too quickly along the darkened road, Sybil says quietly, "I like that Mr. Donnelly." She will drive them back from the scene of the crash, the first time all movie Lucia has let anyone do anything for her. (She didn't let Martin; he took the decision out of her hands.) By the final scene on the telephone, Sybil is silently watching again. So she does have one ally at home, but they're bound within the same kind of system. I guess I hope for second-wave intersectional feminism for both of them.
But I bet that's a relationship they'd have a hard time showing in the Code era.
That sounds fascinating, though, and I look forward to reading it.
no subject
a.) in the book, it's not the daughter who kills the sleazy boyfriend, but Lucia's father, who (if I remember right) mistakes him for a random intruder and gives him a good shove off the pier. He's very proud of himself for chasing off a nuisance and has no idea he's killed him, and Lucia is in large part motivated by the conviction that it would be terrible for him if he realized, and he would probably march straight around and turn himself in; meanwhile, Bea is not guilt-stricken but accusatory, and has plenty of time to get judgy at Lucia about her life and her choices in consorting with strange men;
b.) the time and place: the book is not postwar but war, with Tom at the front, and the setting is East Coast near Manhattan rather than West Coast near LA, though without having seen the movie I couldn't tell you how much of a difference in feel this makes;
c.) and, as you say, Sybil, who -- doesn't necessarily do that much more than you've described, plot-wise, but is a very large presence in Lucia's awareness and thoughts, and does get several significant conversations. Lucia, too, is very aware that Sybil has an inner life that she doesn't have much access to.
no subject
He's very proud of himself for chasing off a nuisance and has no idea he's killed him, and Lucia is in large part motivated by the conviction that it would be terrible for him if he realized, and he would probably march straight around and turn himself in; meanwhile, Bea is not guilt-stricken but accusatory, and has plenty of time to get judgy at Lucia about her life and her choices in consorting with strange men;
That's a really interesting shift on the film's part, then. It changes not just Lucia's motivations, but Bea's stake in the story and (assuming the book has a similar ending) the emotional repercussions of the finale. In the film, it's clear that Bea makes the same connection her mother does: she remembers clocking Darby with the flashlight, then two days later he's found dead; she can't explain how his body got from the boathouse to the swamp where it was discovered, but she understands herself to be in some way responsible for his death. She's already bitterly upset about his betrayal—to a degree that calls into retroactive question whether she really was as confident and active in the affair as she made out to her mother; now that she has no reason to protect him, she behaves a lot more like someone who'd mostly convinced herself she wasn't pressured into it—and, although she can barely voice the thought to her mother and Lucia shuts down the conversation almost as soon as it starts, she too realizes that the letters she wrote Darby will make her a person of interest to the police. There's the issue of reputation, yes, that's real; keeping Bea's name out of the papers is paramount. But there's also the very real fear of criminal charges, which Lucia cannot assuage for her daughter because she fears the same thing. (She doesn't even know that Darby's death happened after Bea left the scene. The viewer is the only person with a clear picture of the incident. And the viewer is pretty certain it wouldn't even amount to a case for manslaughter, but the viewer probably grew up watching Law & Order and nobody in this movie did.) So when Bea hears about Martin's confession, it's like a gift from God—she can stop fretting and blaming herself and when she thinks about her part in the story, it will now go something like and I hit him over the head with the flashlight and he cursed around in the dark for a bit and then he went back to his sleazy ways in L.A. and some other lowlife bumped him off, I had nothing to do with it; it's pure relief. For her mother, of course, it's the exact opposite.
(And shifting the responsibility for the death from an oblivious father to a knowing daughter sidelines the men in Lucia's life even further. It's an explicit point in the film: before the boathouse confrontation, Lucia is trying to write to her husband about the situation with Bea and Darby; she drafts one truthful, confessional letter, discards it and writes a much vaguer one. The original assesses frankly that her father-in-law and her son are no use for chasing off a shady lover and that she herself is no use for talking a headstrong adolescent girl out of a bad relationship. If only I were one of those humorous, tolerant mothers in plays and books but I'm not. I hate that man . . . If only you were here, you'd get rid of that beast. Well, turns out the girl can do it herself; she just doesn't know it or mean to.)
The consorting with strange men issue does exist in the film, although it isn't assigned to any one character so much as the general atmosphere that makes it impossible for Lucia to get away for even a day without having to answer to her family for where she's been. When she comes back from dumping the body, her son scolds her for taking out the motorboat alone: "Mother! Mother, you shouldn't have gone out in the boat! . . . I haven't put in the new spark plugs yet, which incidentally I bought with my own money and you owe me fifty cents for." (That sentence more or less encapsulates her son David, by the way. I have no idea what he's like in the book.) Because she took the car to Los Angeles to meet with Darby, she cannot borrow it again for the rest of the week without raising their curiosity; when she resorts to public transit, she comes home late and they demand explanations anyway. Going out with Martin in his car, she's so easily recognized by fellow-drivers—who pull up alongside her at stop signs and ask her more questions!—that she fumes that they should just have taken hers.
b.) the time and place: the book is not postwar but war, with Tom at the front, and the setting is East Coast near Manhattan rather than West Coast near LA, though without having seen the movie I couldn't tell you how much of a difference in feel this makes;
I feel like the change to postwar should make a significant difference: it is normalized for a woman to be head of the household in wartime with her man away; in peacetime, that kind of autonomy is so much less expected of a woman that almost every independent step Lucia tries to make is checked by the absence of her husband. Get a loan from the bank? Not without Tom's approval. Take anything out of safe deposit? Not without Tom's approval. Take out a loan with a company? Let's start the paperwork with your husband's name. She has to walk into a pawnbroker's shop on the seedy side of the city before she finds someone who doesn't care whether her husband knows what she's doing or not, and he almost certainly cheats her. I have less idea of what the coast-to-coast transfer would do to the tone, but since I've read that New York noir and L.A. noir are distinguishable sub-genres, I'm willing to believe it would do something. There are some potential character implications. Black Irish Martin Donnelly is conspicuously marked as an outsider in Balboa by his accent even before anything else; I don't know if the effect would come off as strongly in the New York metropolitan area. (Would it?)
but is a very large presence in Lucia's awareness and thoughts, and does get several significant conversations. Lucia, too, is very aware that Sybil has an inner life that she doesn't have much access to.
I waver between assuming that was just stripped out because of Code-supported racism and wondering if there was a legitimate script reason for it, because the absence of Sybil as a confidante or at least a constant presence does strengthen the sense of isolation that Lucia feels and the audience perceives about her. I suppose there's no reason it couldn't be both, dammit.
no subject
I'm trying to remember how much Donnelly is implied to stand out in New York and I don't thiiiink it's lots? I mean, it's lots among Lucia's friends, in Lucia's setting, but when they go to Manhattan, not as much. Then it's his world.