That poem is adorable, and the movie sounds jaw-droppingly amazing -- for its era, and even for now.
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. derspatchel is almost certainly right that an abortion could never have been mentioned in the script, but this is still a movie which ends with a woman who attempted to kill her husband about to divorce him and live with a reasonable expectation of happily ever after. That still might be unusual.
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
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.