Not long ago, I had the misfortune of seeing Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment at Metrograph with an audience mostly made up of insufferable cine-bros, who proceeded to laugh openly and repeatedly at the film from its very first line of dialogue. The weirdest thing about this reaction is how it can occur at a screening of just about any old movie, no matter its reputation. I’ve sat among downtown audiences—mostly young, white, and male, and likely attendees or graduates, as I admittedly am, of the Tisch School of the Arts—who chortled with snide irreverence at works as disparate as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. But something about the reaction towards The Reckless Moment vexed me more than it has on past occasions. Maybe it was because this 1949 noir melodrama, centered around a California homemaker (Joan Bennett) who resorts to desperate measures to cover up her seventeen-year-old daughter’s self-defensive murder of her lowlife beau, is seldom talked about these days, much less held up with the type of deferential awe that Vertigo, Imitation of Life, and Chinatown continue to inspire in many. Today it seems to exist only as a brief footnote in the exquisite and highly vaunted career of its German-born director, or else as the movie whose source material, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel The Blank Wall, also inspired the 2001 thriller The Deep End.
I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is about these old movies that inspires such derisive laughter. In the case of The Reckless Moment, I wonder if it’s the heightened and uniform performance style of the exemplary Bennett, costar James Mason, and their fellow actors, each one stripped of irony and unblinking in their sincerity, however hard-boiled they may initially appear. Or is it simply, at the end of the day, so much easier to condescend to a film that we don’t have the heart to take seriously, to put the brakes on our empathetic engines because, after all, why should we exert our energy feeling for and identifying with long-dead people play-acting conflicts that we could never and would never get caught in?
Yet unlike the Hitchcock, Sirk, and Polanski films, which provoked this condescending laughter all the way through, The Reckless Moment eventually managed to silence my audience. In the gut-wrenching finale, Mason’s character, who entered the film as Bennett’s blackmailer before unexpectedly falling for her, makes the ultimate sacrifice to absolve her and her daughter of any culpability. I will never forget the hush that fell over us all as we watched Bennett turn away from the camera, her strong back suddenly bent over and heaving with sobs. She seemed inconsolable, filled with the knowledge that whatever good might have come from this accident has just perished on the side of the road, safely returning her to the comfort of her home and her absentee husband. When he calls her in the film’s final moments, she stands framed behind her staircase, its balusters resembling prison bars. The sting of human loss has rarely been rendered with such wretched and irremediable devastation in cinema.
The year before The Reckless Moment, Ophüls made his greatest American film, Letter from an Unknown Woman, a romantic tragedy adapted from Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella of the same name. In that movie, a willful Viennese woman (Joan Fontaine) becomes enmeshed in her own form of reckless love, the object of which is a caddish concert pianist (Louis Jourdan) who beds her, impregnates her, leaves her, and forgets her in the span of a few days. I first saw Ophüls’ masterpiece at Metro-graph in the summer of 2017. I can’t remember if my audience laughed, though if they did I was far too wrapped up in the anguish unspooling before me to take heed of any distractions.
For roughly the first half an hour of this formidably concise, eighty-six-minute heartbreaker, the impossibly elegant thirty-year-old Fontaine plays the protagonist, Lisa, as a gauche and lovestruck teenager. It’s a choice that, on paper, all but begs to be laughed at by both wearier-than-thou hipsters and solemn cinephiles. And yet I never laugh, largely because Fontaine’s performance remains a revelatory achievement of self-abandoning immersion, whose greatness even her indelible, terrorized role in Rebecca cannot adequately prepare one to appreciate. What makes her such an utterly believable teenager? The searching eyes that grow so frequently apologetic for the flagrancy of their inquisitiveness? The willowy, unrefined movements of a young girl stuck in that awkward midway point between childhood ease and womanly poise? The beautifully expressive mouth that smirks, frowns, and bites over its bottom lip with reflexive, red-cheeked bashfulness? All of these choices indeed work wonders, but what really convinces is the wild soul Fontaine evokes from beneath a persona that only looks well-behaved, carrying us past the point of our recognition of the star on the screen and firmly into the mindscape of Letter’s Lisa.
Though Lisa never speaks aloud her letter’s forthright declarations, the fiery vividness of Fontaine’s acting connects the character’s headstrong choices and split-second impulses to the all-consuming, self-subjugating love that will be her undoing. In other words, the sheer strength of Fontaine’s intensity compels us to understand Lisa’s reasons. Such a performance requires an actress who, like her director, takes female desire—and teenage sexual curiosity—seriously, who knows that infatuation is a complex and ungovernable power. This auteur’s directorial touch fits the story like a tailored glove, because it honors the importance of all matters of the heart and commits to evoking such matters with a rare virtuosity. Ophüls’ technique is rooted in his understanding that cinema can make manifest the inexorable and irretrievable passage of time with tools that are specific to the medium, in much the way a camera’s effortless glide or an editor’s seamless cut can collapse and bypass mortal boundaries.
The sacrificial heroines that Ophüls excelled at depicting may not be anyone’s notion of a progressive ideal, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be granted empathy, insight, and psychological depth on the screen. To my mind, Fontaine’s emphasis on the blinding, masochistic pleasure that Lisa appears to take in her denial of propriety is a more critical and demythologizing gesture than audiences and critics at the time were willing to admit. The character remains a romantic heroine, but our sympathies are complicated: our eyes are wet with the calamity of her loss, but also narrowed in recognition of her glaring faults. We can’t ignore the lapses in judgment that her fixation causes, rooted as it is in the sanctimonious belief that a sole true love is its own higher power. These obsessions may not seem empowering to a modern-day cinema that can only embrace love when it’s used (in something like Wonder Woman) as an instrument of war, but that doesn’t mean an obsession like Lisa’s can’t occur in everyday life. The final insult that Stefan commits against Lisa, the final tragedy of Letter from an Unknown Woman, is that she remains unknown to him in her last days on earth, the loyalty of her love validated by the drastic irreversibility of death.
We run a grave risk by shrugging off films like Letter and The Reckless Moment as historical curios, mere artifacts of sight and sound. Beneath their monochromatic luster, Ophüls’ films are startlingly attuned to the painful realities of women from various corners of life, whether it be the hardscrabble survivalism of a middle-class housewife left to fend for herself (as in The Reckless Moment), the spurned sincerity of a French noblewoman (The Earrings of Madame de…), the gentle guilelessness of a self-effacing model (Caught), or the fatalistic pang of the besotted woman who stands unrecognized by the man she hopelessly loves (Letter from an Unknown Woman). Ophüls’ women stand before us on the screen—physically unchanged from the time he filmed them, their struggles viewed with a kind of compassion that still rings true.
Beneath the noise of the laughter with which some of us greet these fictional women is a malignant presence that is also an absence—a lack of curiosity that prevents us from truly seeing and knowing the pleasures and wisdom that Ophüls’ cinema still has to offer. These movies have not lost an ounce of visual beauty, emotional force, or real-world intelligence in the decades that have come and gone since their debut. The only thing lost in this passage of time is our ability and our willingness to be moved, mesmerized, and maybe changed by images that are somehow more perfect than our world could ever be, even as they strive to capture all of life’s aching, agonizing imperfections.
Matthew Eng’s writing has appeared in the Criterion Collection, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and other publications.
