The reckless moment

Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, whom Raymond Chandler called “the top suspense writer of them all,” wrote The Blank Wall (1947) about a wartime wife who starts out hiding cigarettes and ends up hiding a body. Ophuls captures the subtext, as Juliet Clark describes: “The Reckless Moment traces the traps of American domesticity with both irony and painful compassion. The plot is set in motion by the accidental killing of Joan Bennett’s daughter’s unsavory lover, but the film’s emotional intensity derives less from this crisis than from the relentlessness of the everyday . . . a condition only sympathetic blackmailer James Mason seems to notice.”