Keep the Christmas Noirs coming! Tonight I uncovered another gem, "The Reckless Moment"(1949), directed by none other than Max Ophuls, and starring Joan Bennett and James Mason. Please remember the importance of correct pronunciation where his name is concerned. It must be pronounced as if he were saying it himself, in that perfect London accent, slightly drawn out. To wit : "Chames May-son". Practice it a few times til you have it down, it's not too difficult nor too much to ask, I don't think.
At any rate, Bennett plays "Lucia Harper", the upper middle class wife of an architect, living with their children on Balboa Island off the coast of Newport Beach. I must cut in to say that Balboa is a cool location. I've never seen it used before in a movie, but I mention it because Dad used to take us there in the late 60s, to walk along the small midway and eat chocolate covered frozen bananas from the ice cream stand. It had a "funky little beach town" atmosphere.
The movie takes place in the residential sector of the island, a part I never saw. Lucia and her family live near the cliffs in a big ol' Cape Cod, complete with boat house. She's a Supermom, and has to be because her husband is often away, due to the nature of his job. She has things mostly under control, with the help of her housekeeper Sybil (Frances E. Williams), but her rebellious teenage daughter is seeing a shady character twice her age. He's purportedly an art dealer; that's the real attraction. The daughter's an artist, the man has promised to sell her paintings. Really though, he's just a lowlife who wants to take advantage, and Joan Bennett knows it. As the movie opens, she drives to Los Angeles where he lives, to demand that he leave her daughter alone. He agrees to do so, if she will pay him a sum of money.
Joan refuses, telling him that her daughter will dump him anyway, once she knows he's put a price on their relationship.
The gambit works. When the dealer drives down to visit Miss Brooks on the sly, she confronts him about his bid to cash in. Caught, he admits it, then begins to laugh. "Of course I would've taken the money! It's not like your mother can't afford it"! The seventeen year old is now humiliated and begins to act out. She hits the man. He tries to restrain her and ends up falling over the railing of the home's upper deck. He is impaled by a small anchor lying below on the sand, and Miss Brooks runs off into the night, in shock at the terrible turn of events.
The next morning, her Mom spots the body lying on the beach. She has a good idea what's happened, and makes an on-the-spot decision to protect her daughter. Using a motorboat, she hauls the dead art dealer out to sea, and dumps him overboard. Unfortunately, he washes up a day or two later, and the local paper is trumpeting the headlines: "Los Angeles Art Dealer Murdered! Body Found On Beach"!
The good news is that the police are clueless as to who did it. This is little Balboa Island, fifty miles south of L.A. Who would know the victim here? They have no suspects. Only Joan Bennett and her daughter know what happened, and Joan is a Mama Lion.
But..........then one day Chames Mason shows up at their door. He's a professional blackmailer, and somehow he's gotten hold of a stack of love letters the young Miss Brooks had written to the dead man. He wants Five Gees to relinquish them to Mom Bennett, who has no way of getting the cash without alerting her husband, who's in Berlin on business. She tries to placate Mason, who just becomes more insistent, telling her that if she doesn't come up with the money, she'll have to deal with his blackmail partner, who "doesn't play around".
It's a brutal setup. Bennett is tied in a knot between wanting to protect her daughter and a lack of funds to pay the blackmailers.
But then something happens, slowly over the course of her dealings with Mason. As you know, he is an actor of Great Earnestness. Watch him as an IRA hoodlum on the run in "Odd Man Out". Even when he plays a Bad Guy, as he does there - and in this film too - he does so with the Utmost Regret in his heart. James Mason in all honesty was one of the very greatest English actors who ever lived, but his specialty was in drawing out the deep sincerity of his characters. He always went below the surface, and because this is a Max Ophuls movie, he will be given the chance to redeem himself. Ophuls explored the tragic consequences of deceit in the materially well-off. Once again, I suggest watching "The Earrings of Madame De..", which I mentioned recently. He focuses usually on women caught in a web not entirely of their own making. But here, he has James Mason as a blackmailer who takes an Earnest Turn of Heart.
I'll tell you no more, the hour is very late, and you must see it for yourself. Max Ophuls is an overlooked director who should be ranked with the greats, at least in the limited sense of his artistic focus, on a single social strata, that of the befallen woman of wealth.
For me, beyond the context of his themes, I think of him as one of the most stylish directors of all time. His art direction and settings are always impeccable, and his photography is as good as it gets, in the realm of Hollywood Craftsmanship. Discover his movies and give him a shot. And oh yes...."The Reckless Moment" can be considered a Christmas Noir because the crime takes place during the Holiday Season, and Joan Bennett manages to complete her shopping before December 25th. The presents are all under the tree at the end. ////
That's all for tonight. Happy Winter Solstice! Did you see the Christmas Star this evening?
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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