New Print!

This is a masterpiece of the kind of dark melodrama that exposed the quality of domestic American life in the late forties. At the same time it is squarely in the Max Ophuls oeuvre: The Reckless Moment builds its considerable suspense on the illusions harbored by the suburban middle-class woman, Madame De without the earrings. Joan Bennett stars as a repressed but contented housewife whose routine existence is shattered by her daughter's involvement with a philanderer, and by her own role in his death. James Mason is cast against type as a lower-class blackmailer who smoothes his way into Bennett's life, trying to pin her down. Their intense spider-and-fly relationship gradually softens as his wistful charm turns to sympathy. Ophuls's eye for detail in deep-focus compositions, made famous in his late French films La Ronde and Lola Montès, is already evident here, and Burnett Guffey's camerawork uses the sunlight of a small-town locale for a harsh southern (California) exposure. The story was recently remade as The Deep End with Tilda Swinton.