The Reckless Moment ****½ (1949, James Mason, Joan Bennett, Geraldine Brooks) – Classic Movie Review 2143

Director Max Ophüls‘s uber-tense and super-stylish 1949 film noir suspense thriller is set in Balboa 50 miles from Los Angeles. It stars Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, an American middle-class mother becomes increasingly deranged after she discovers the dead body of scoundrel Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick), the lover of her teenage daughter Bea(Geraldine Brooks). And, in a reckless moment, she hides the body of the man she thinks her daughter has murdered, though she’s actually innocent of the killing.

But the corpse is then found by a smooth blackmailer called Martin Donnelly (James Mason), who starts to make her life hell, as the housewife fights back by taking desperate measures to protect her family from scandal.

Ophuls tempts you in to the dark side and teases and intrigues you in the best Hitchcock way in his marvellously contrived, splendidly unreal crime mystery. Staged in the special, atmospheric film noir cosmos, it is played with the greatest commitment and flair, and made with the greatest brio and aplomb.

Director Ophuls shows what a superb stylist he is – and this is the intensely engrossing Bennett and creepy charmer Mason at their best. Burnett Guffey’s sleekly noirish black and white cinematography is the icing on the cake.

Based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel The Blank Wall, this little gem is a Forties film noir highspot.

Also in the cast are Henry O’Neill, David Blair, Roy Roberts, Frances Williams, Paul E Burns, Danny Jackson, Claire Carleton, Peter Brocco, Danny Jackson, Bobby Hyatt, Louis Mason and Charles Marsh.

Remade as The Deep End in 2001.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2143

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