The Reckless Moment dating history

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When discussing Joan Bennett's career she had two definitely distinct phases of her career. The Blonde period which was from 1929 to 1938. In the film Trade Winds Joan changes from blonde to her natural color which was brunette. Her husband Producer Walter Wanger had produced Algiers which starred newcomer Hedy Lamarr and afterwards when Lamarr became a popular figure, Wanger thought that Joan would attract the same attention. The hair color change did more than accentuate Joan's naturally good facial-bone structure. It also brought out a more alluring screen image for Bennett there was a sense of danger now. This led up to Joan's femme fatale period with her first two roles in The Woman In The Window (1945, RKO) and Scarlett Street 1946, Universal) both costarring Edward G. Robinson and Dan Duryea. In 1949 Joan starred in the very last film that Max Ophuls made in Hollywood before returning to Europe. This was Ophuls' moment-in-the-sun his twin Femme Noir home runs of 1949, Caught (1949, MGM) and The Reckless Moment (Columbia). The latter of the two may be, in fact, one of its decade's greatest forgotten films, a stock melodramatic programmer (adapted from a Ladies Home Journal short story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding) that was reconceived and crafted with such deftness and attention to emotional detail that it shutters scores of contemporaneous noirs and dramas out of the memory. This was not how a studio product was mass-manufactured in the immediate postwar years - here we see Ophuls, almost as far from his native element as he could be, from the depths to the abyss of the American family virtually no filmmaker had done it before. What is startling today is the grown-up attention paid to Bennett's character, undoubtedly the best and most rounded role she ever had in a career that lasted almost 60 years, a fashionable modern woman forced to engage in cold-blooded crime to save her spoiled children, and keeping her lid on so tight she can nag the kids about manners and wrangle the underworld practically in the same breath. It's difficult to think of a single other film from that era that attends so realistically to a homegrown bourgeois mother - the way she hovers over her shamed-sick daughter (Geraldine Brooks), or shops in an impatient hurry, or lays out bills on the bed when working out finances, or briskly dishes out familial commands while clearly troubled with darker business. The anxiety and social stress carrying on underneath the surface of The Reckless Moment is hypnotic, and James Mason's brooding hood is fascinatingly out of place, but this is Bennett's show, and her performance is one of the most nuanced and resonant lead performances of the 1940s. Ophüls is definitely a bona fide master of camera movement and mise-en-scene, densely packs the frames with people and objects, allowing the camera to soak up the ornateness while emphasizing the crowded, crushing character of both Bennett's domestic and criminal lives. ("You don't know how a family can surround you at times," she laments at one point.) In a particularly intriguingly staged scene—Mason and Bennett are combatively talking in his car while a ferry takes them across an estuary, police boats silently circling the area—one is struck by just how calm Lucia is, how Bennett makes her, as a homemaker totally contained by this lifestyle, focused on the details of when she has to pay by and how much, rather than becoming crazed or weepy under the pressure. Like with Caught (1949) before it, Ophüls grants his characters an adult seriousness, the ability to consider themselves and their situation, which results in a far more mature melodrama, one very much thought out in emotional, psychological, and human terms. Veteran Noir cinematographer, Burnett Guffey, smoothly establishes the impending entrapment within mobile tracking shots that move from light to dark, from unruffled clarity to shadows and unsettling movement, from the beguiling every-day to menacing disturbance. The Reckless Moment is a deeply conservative tale, one about a woman who's punished, essentially, for making big decisions without consulting her husband, for trying to wrest control of a situation and a family she has no business, as a woman, controlling. Her selfless act of love for her daughter, cleaning up, the dead body of her daughter's boyfriend, gets her into more trouble than she can handle; her act of love makes her a prisoner and a victim. She's finally saved, though, when her love is paid in kind by the selfless act of another, of a man (Mason), that finally sets everything right. She ends the film on the phone with her husband, telling him that everything's going to be OK...once he gets home, and the family unit is restored. In his final American film Max Ophüls’ has clearly found a way to deeply stylize typical Hollywood material and get real empathy out of it, a depth to emotions and lives that was so rare in this era.