THE RECKLESS MOMENT

This 1949 thriller is a real obscurity, which made little impact upon its release, but it's directed by the highly regarded Max Ophüls, it stars James Mason and its reputation is on an upward curve.  And it's only 82 minutes long.

Mason though is absent during the first 30 minutes, during which the focus is on his co-star Joan Bennett, who plays Mrs Harper, a wife and mother in an affluent Californian household.  Husband Tom is away for a prolonged period doing some engineering work in of all places Berlin.  So Mrs Harper has to run things on her own.

Top of her to-do list is to try to put an end to the developing relationship between her 17-year old daughter Bea, and a much older man, a dodgy art dealer called Mr Brady.

As any parent will tell you trying to stop a teenager doing something only makes them dig their heels in, so it's no surprise when Bea has a clandestine night-time rendezvous with Mr Brady in the family boathouse.  But when Mr Brady makes clear he's quite happy to leave her alone in return for some money, Bea gets angry and hits him on the head with the first thing to hand (a plank of wood I think) before running indoors to mother. 

Mrs Harper then goes looking for Mr Brady but can't find him, owing to the fact that in his dazed condition he fell to the beach below.

Early next morning Mrs Harper goes looking for him again and discovers his dead body on the beach next to an anchor.  She drags his body into the family's small boat and disposes of the body further down the coast.  Fortunately nobody sees her so her only problem seems to be stopping Bea, who's gone to pieces, from telling someone about Mr Brady.

There's no getting away from the fact that this section of the film has its problems.

One is the mystery as to how Mr Brady died.  The police reckon someone killed him with an anchor, because of the shape of his wound.  Alternatively we are I think meant to believe he died by falling on to the anchor.  Either explanation is highly improbable which is maybe why all Wikipedia's plot summary says is that he "accidentally falls and subsequently dies".

(To further muddy the water "The Sunday Times Guide To Movies On Television" states that Mrs Harper killed Brady, but that's just plain wrong.)

The other thing that stretches credulity is Mrs Harper managing to lift his dead body into and out of the boat.  Ophüls' solution is simply not to film her doing this.

Anyway things pick up (for us, if not Mrs Harper) when Mason at last makes his entrance as Irish Mr Donnelly, who is seeking $5,000 (a small fortune in those days) in return for handing over some letters Bea wrote to Mr Brady.

We then get several scenes showing Mrs Harper struggling to raise the cash, not easy when her bank won't lend her any money because she's a mere woman.

During all this a strange intimacy begins to develop between Donnelly and Mrs Harper.

It turns out that Donnelly doesn't really enjoy being a blackmailer but he has to do what his unpleasant partner Nagel wants.  He is in fact quite sympathetic to her plight and he also I think admires her decency and regrets the life of crime he is embroiled in.

The film goes out of its way to show us that Mrs Harper truly loves her husband, but who wouldn't find James Mason quite charming, especially when he does little things like buy her a cigarette filter because smoking is bad for her health?

As we approach the end of the film things naturally take a melodramatic turn.  Donnelly kills Nagel (in the boathouse, where else?).  Mrs Harper, very nobly, wants to tell the police everything so as to help Donnelly.  Equally nobly Donnelly, realising that such a course of action would be disastrous for her and her family, refuses her offer.  Instead he dies in an accidental car crash, but not before returning the letters to Mrs Harper, and then confessing to Brady's murder when the police turn up.  

The last scene is Mrs Harper returning home, and throwing herself on her bed in tears, before composing herself to speak to husband Tom on the phone, telling him he can't come home soon enough. 

The film is an adaptation of a story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whose writing was admired by Raymond Chandler, among others.  Even so this story's plot is not the most plausible.  But the excellent performances by Mason and Bennett makes their relationship believable and ultimately quite touching.

The film looks good, thanks to fluid camerawork and a lot of location shooting.  This is the first picture by Ophüls that I've sampled, and it certainly makes me want to see more. 

RATING: ✓ Cheers