Wise Blood (1979)

At first glance, John Huston would seem to be a problematic choice to adapt Flannery O'Connor's novel WISE BLOOD. On one hand, the grotesque story of a young hillbilly "preacher" named Hazel Motes who tries to begin a "Church Without Christ" might seem good material for a director who'd always had an instinctive feel for oddballs. On the other hand, O'Connor's vision wasn't merely grotesque, it was, as she famously put it, "Christ-haunted." Her vision was dark and funny, yes, but O'Connor believed furiously in heaven and hell. Huston--the director of masterpieces like THE MALTESE FALCON and THE ASPHALT JUNGLE--was an atheist. How could an unbelieving, hard drinking, globetrotting, hairy-chested womanizer like Huston adapt the twisted vision of a Jesus-obsessed, lupus-stricken, farmer's daughter who once said that her life had been lived mainly "between the back door and the chicken coop"?

That question can only be answered by watching Huston's remarkable adaption of WISE BLOOD. The director always had an excellent eye for the best parts of a novel, and his unfussy shooting style seemed--when he was at his best--to do exactly what was needed and no more. O'Connor must have posed a particular challenge, though. Her story centers around the disturbing figure of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) and his quest to blaspheme his way into unbelief, but Motes is also surrounded by gallery of freaks and nutcases. There's the con man Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton) posing as a blind man, his nympho daughter Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright), and a psycho named Enoch Emery who steals a small mummified corpse from a museum and then dresses up in a Gorilla suit. With this kind of material, it's difficult not to spiral into sheer madness.

Huston manages to embrace the story without letting it get away from him. The final twenty minutes or so of this film have a quiet, terrible power. They're shocking, but Huston doesn't really play them for shocks. He simply goes all the way with Hazel Motes, an objective observer to the man's passions and foibles, which is the hallmark of any great John Huston movie. He builds this film on the fanatical central performance by Brad Dourif. Best known to most people as the stuttering Billy in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (though he also served as the voice of Chucky in the CHILD'S PLAY series), Dourif was an inspired choice for this role. He gives Motes a rawboned restlessness, and he seems to instinctively grasp that the man is tormented, as O'Connor wrote, by the ragged figure of Christ in the back of his mind. For much of the film, his sky blue eyes are wild with that torment. Keep that observation in mind when you get to the end of the film. Eyes, and their function and failure, are vital here.

WISE BLOOD doesn't have the classic perfection of some of Huston's best work. The film's cinematography (by Gerry Fisher) is flat, and I wish the filmmakers had been able to shoot the film in period detail. O'Connor's novel was released in 1952, and there's something disconcerting about seeing it unfold in 1979. I mean, were kids still lining up to see a guy in a gorilla suit in 79? Hadn't they already moved onto Wookies at that point?

Still, these quibbles aside, WISE BLOOD is one hell of an odd movie, based on one hell of an odd book--which makes for a fascinating piece of cinema.

***

Flannery O'Connor might be, pound for pound, my favorite writer. She's certainly one of the most original literary talents that this country's ever produced. WISE BLOOD is the better of her two novels, but her most indispensable work is THE COMPLETE STORIES, a funny, terrifying, and masterfully wrought work of art. She's the poet laureate of fanatics and Jesus Freaks.

There's a lot of stuff on the web about O'Connor, but the best site is Comforts of Home: The Flannery O'Connor Repository

Finally, a quick word about the Criterion Collection DVD of the film. This is a terrific package, featuring interviews with Dourif and the screenwriters. It also contains an insightful essay by Francine Prose and an astounding audio recording--the only one in existence--of O'Connor giving a reading of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" at Vanderbilt University in 1959. It should also be noted that the Criterion DVD has the best picture quality of this movie that I've seen. (It also has a gorgeous package. Click here to take a look).

The Devil's Ground: THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY and THE GOSPEL OF MARK

 

The title of Flannery O'Connor's 1960 novel THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY comes from the Gospel of Matthew (11:12), but as I reread O'Connor's book recently, I was reminded more of the Gospel of Mark.

Mark differs from the other gospels in being shorter, leaner, and less expository. It has no virgin birth. Indeed, starting out, it tells us nothing at all of Jesus's early life. In Mark, Jesus simply appears among the anonymous throng of people coming from Galilee to be baptized by John the Baptist in the wilderness. Upon being baptized by the prophet, however, Jesus is immediately driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. "And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan, and was with the wild beasts." When he returns, he begins a ministry of exorcism and faith healing that he tries, repeatedly, to keep secret. While the Jesus of Mark does some teaching (though far less than in the other Gospels), he is more a man of action. And that action tends to be confronting a world of demons (including the infamous demon collective known as Legion). At the end, Christ is crucified and dies alone uttering the final words "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me." The oldest copies of Mark didn't even have a resurrection appearance. The book ended originally at Mark 16:8, with women coming to the tomb, finding it empty, and running away. The final verse reads, "Trembling and bewildered, they fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY is no Christ allegory, and I don't mean to imply that its story resembles the plot of Mark's Gospel. But O'Connor's second novel (like her first, WISE BLOOD) is obsessively focused on what she once called "the action of grace in ground held largely by the devil." One need only to read Mark again to see that this also happens to be the central thrust of that evangelist's narrative. 

O'Connor's novel follows Francis Marion Tarwater, a young man running away from his calling to be a prophet. The action of the novel hinges on the death of Tarwater's great-uncle, a wild-eyed fanatic who kidnapped the boy years before and raised him in a cabin the woods, preparing him to be a prophet. When the old man dies, however, the boy tries to shrug off his calling--getting drunk and burning down the old man's house--then heads into the city to see his other uncle, an atheist schoolteacher named Rayber. But Francis finds himself fighting the urge to baptize Rayber's young son Bishop, an act that itself was prophesied by the old man before his death.   

Although WISE BLOOD and THE VILOLENT BEAR IT AWAY share many characteristics--both are about young men attempting to run away from God, both are darkly comic, and both are unmistakably the work of a Catholic author filtering her vision through the lens of Southern Protestant fundamentalism--the second book more closely resembles Mark's vision of a demonic world. If WISE BLOOD is about a man tormented by God's grace, THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY is about a man tempted by Satan and his devil possessed followers. The ghostly 'stranger' who appears at Tarwater's side, whispering in his ear to forsake his calling to preach, takes a physical form in the book's penultimate chapter, when a hitchhiking Tarwater is picked up, drugged, and raped by a stranger in a lavender suit. In the dense symbolism of the novel--the stranger takes both Tarwater's prized hat and a corkscrew bottle opener given to him by the atheist schoolteacher--Tarwater is stripped of everything he has relied on and is left naked in the woods.

This last part reminded me of two of the strangest lines in Mark--indeed, two of the oddest lines in all of the Bible--verses 14:51-52. At the Garden, when Jesus is being arrested and all his disciples have abandoned him, we are told "And there followed him a certain young man having a linen cast about his naked body, and they laid hold on him. And the young man left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked." Who is this young man? Why is he the last one with Jesus, and why is he dressed only in a sheet? Why is Mark the only writer to report his existence? We're never told, but it bears repeating that Mark is a strange, cryptic book compared to the other Gospels. In this book, where secrecy is the coin of the realm, mysteries remain intact because the narrative is more about mystery than revelation.

Like the naked young man in the Garden, Tarwater flees, and he returns to the ashes of his great-uncle's burned down house. He hears a call to "GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY." Smearing himself with dirt from the old man's grave, he prepares to begin his journey "toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping."

In both O'Connor's novel and Mark's Gospel, the prose is pared down and spare, working in the service of a vision rich in dark symbolism and mystery. Neither author reveals all they know. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is this: for both Flannery O'Connor and Mark the Evangelist, the mystery is the revelation.    

      

    

COCKFIGHTER (1974)

-->

Monte Hellman's COCKFIGHTER is a laid-back, drawling piece of outsider cinema that stays in the mind long after it's over. In its tone of southern-fried eccentricity and implicit violence, it has a spiritual connection to John Huston's vastly underrated adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's WISE BLOOD. (Perhaps not incidentally, Hellman's film climaxes in Milledgeville, GA, the hometown of O'Connor and thus the Mecca of Southern Grotesque.) It tells the story of Frank Mansfield, a down on his luck cockfighter who has sworn a vow of silence until he wins the title of Cockfighter of the Year. It's impossible to describe the plot beyond this point without imposing more of a structure on the film than it really seems to want. As Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, "Hellman manages to suggest the point that watching a movie called COCKFIGHTER is as ridiculous as watching a cockfight." True, but Frank Mansfield takes cockfighting as seriously as a religious calling, and the film doesn't seem to question his belief.

The film was produced as a Roger Corman cheapie and stars the great wild shaman of 70s grindhouse/art cinema, Warren Oates. It's not an action film--though it was sold as such (even re-titled BORN TO KILL and given a wholly misleading poster that presented Oates as an ax-wielding psychopath). One could be tempted to call it in a film noir, though I'm not sure that, ultimately, the designation will fit. There's too much good ol' boy humor, too much of a movement, however sputtering, toward redemption. Again, I go back to WISE BLOOD. Like that film, COCKFIGHTER takes place in a sealed world. Betting on cockfights seems to be the only economy that exists in this barren, burned out vision of the American south (the sun peels back the edges of certain shots). It also seems to be the only mode of social interaction. As Frank Mansfield pursues his goal with dogged purpose (like one of O'Connor's Jesus-obsessed hillbillies--but for, you know, fightin' roosters) we never peek outside of his world of trailers and trucks and chicken coops.

Though the screenwriter and novelist Charles Willeford (who also appears in the film) claimed he based the script on The Odyssey, it essentially plays as a kind of gritty redneck sports flick. The existential kicker here, of course, is that the damn birds do all the fighting. Frank and his main nemesis Jack (the reliably superb Harry Dean Stanton) are just a couple of broken men who throw down money in the hopes that luck will fall their way. Maybe it is a little noirish after all.

Read my essay on Wise Blood here.

Ebert on Reflections In A Golden Eye

Roger Ebert isn't just my favorite critic, he's one of my favorite writers. I was thirteen when my mother bought me a collection of his four star-reviews, a prophetic impulse-buy for her burgeoning cinephile of a middle child. I studied that book like scripture and through it I discovered many films.

One of the films Ebert introduced me to (either in that book or in one of the dozen or so of his guide books that I bought afterward) was John Huston's bizarre REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Years later, I'd get to see the film on the big screen at the AFI Silver.

Is it brilliant? Is it awful? Is it some kind of camp masterpiece somewhere in the middle? To be frank, you could make a compelling argument for any of these points of view. One thing is for sure: Huston and his stars fearlessly pursue Carson McCullers's southern gothic vision exactly where she wanted it to go. Huston might well have been the greatest adapter of books in the history of cinema--think THE MALTESE FALCON, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE, THE MAN WOULD BE KING, WISE BLOOD--and this movie should be on the list of his notable accomplishments. Love it or hate it, I bet you you've never seen anything like it.

Taylor's death brought the movie to mind, and it brought to mind the impact of Ebert's essay. Lo and behold, it must have been on his mind as well because he posted his review over at his website. To get a sense of it's impact, the impact of a great critic on one's perception of a difficult film, read the essay here.

Preaching to the Damned: Flannery O'Connor's Universe of Sinners

I have a framed picture of Flannery O’Connor on my wall at home. It’s a nice black and white close-up shot of Flannery smiling and looking off to the right. She’s wearing what looks to be a black dress. She has on horned-rimmed glasses and her teeth are a little crooked. She looks not unlike a middle school math teacher, the one you didn’t like. If you know anything about O’Connor’s work then the picture is a little surprising, in much the same what the yearbook photo of that same math teacher was always a little jarring: who knew she ever smiled?

Despite their humor, one might not guess from O’Connor’s stories that she ever smiled. There’s a hard edge to the humor in an O’Connor story, and how could it not be sharp when her stories deal with an unceasing parade of freaks, psychopaths, cripples, fanatics and wholly unsympathetic mother figures? Understand that I don’t mean any of this as a criticism. That geek show quality is what you should be looking for when you curl up with an O’Connor story for the night. If you like her, you’ll keep coming back to the well. If you don’t like her, one drink will probably do you for life.

I first discovered O’Connor in a creative writing class (isn’t it odd how we talk about our "discovery" of writers, as if they’re continents to be searched out, stumbled onto and explored for their riches?). The class had been assigned to read some other story, but I got the page numbers confused and read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by mistake.
 
How can one explain lightening striking? To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s comment on his discovery of Elvis: I read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and I knew I was never going to work a regular job again. I knew I wanted to be a writer. The discovery of certain writers sweeps away all the rational arguments against becoming a writer yourself. This was what O’Connor meant to me. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” dealt with the murder of a small family at the hands of a gang of thieves led by a religiously tormented philosopher/psychopath called the Misfit. I can’t say I understood O’Connor at the time, and, for that matter, I can’t say I understand her now. Greatness tends to inspire the desire to know and explain while robbing us of the ability. What matters, however, is not my understanding of the complex (and, sometimes, contrived) layers in O’Connor’s work. What matters is that O’Connor was the first writer I ever read whose vision of the world—religious, tormented, flawed—was skewed rather close to my own. It wasn’t the gun in the Misfit’s hand that made the story interesting for me, it was the thoughts in his head, the doubts about life and death and the haunting assertion that Jesus had achieved victory over both.

The irony, of course, is that O’Connor was a Catholic and her stories were suffused with her Catholicism. I was still a fundamentalist Southern Baptist when I discovered her, and yet it seemed to me that O’Connor was somewhat Baptist, even fundamentalist, in her worldview. She imagined a world in which an old woman can find grace as three bullets are fired into her scrawny chest. And what can I say but that this somehow appealed to me. I’m not advocating the shooting of old women, of course, not even for evangelical purposes. No, I think old women—and young women, and little girls, and males of all ages—should probably be left unshot, ungored and unbeaten, even by agents of God’s will. O’Connor would doubtless consider me weak. But what appealed to me in her work was not so much the violence unbelievers and backsliders had to endure, as much as it was the spiritual landscape they were made to transverse. In O’Connor’s world no one laughs off matters of faith for very long. Part of the virtue of her fiction is that she saw everyone as essentially corrupt. There are no paragons of virtue—no dewy eyed virgins or kind hearted old men from whom the wicked are forced to learn pious lessons. In O’Connor’s world, every man, woman and child is a sinner and the battle between the flesh and the spirit, between pride and grace, is never easy.

These reflections were inspired, at least in part, by the recent publication of A PRAYER JOURNAL, a collection of prayers and private religious reflections that O’Connor wrote between January 1946 and September 1947. She was only twenty years old when she began the journal, but in it her personality as a writer (acidic, pious, and fiercely intelligent) already seems fully formed. It’s an incredibly intimate look at her mind, a record of her most sacred meditations. We see her wrestling with her faith: “Dear Lord, please make me want you[…]There is a want but it is abstract and cold[…]” And we see her beseeching god for help: “Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work[...]Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.” In the best sense, the book shows her to be the Flannery O’Connor one would expect.

It’s impossible to read her prayer journal without reflecting on her fiction. The universe she created was full to bursting with preachers, fanatics and unbelievers. Unbelievers had it the worst, of course. I think of poor atheistic Sheppard in “The Lame Shall Enter First.” He takes in a boy preacher/thief as a good deed and pays dearly for his act of kindness. Didn’t that poor bastard know he was in O’Connor land? Could he possibly hope to survive the story unscathed? Not only was he an atheist, but he was a humanist, and Flannery O’Connor—at least in the godlike role of creator of her fictional universe—would not abide an optimistic belief in the human being. On some level, we were all Enoch Emery to Flannery. Enoch, the hero of “Enoch and the Gorilla,” (if "hero" is not too ironic a term for the main character in an O’Connor story), is one of her finest creations, an idiot obsessed with a man in a gorilla suit outside a movie theater. The story works as a dark comedy, but O’Connor’s critique of the theory of evolution, her critique of the idea that humanity could possibly have improved, is scathing. It’s damn near scalding. The story is one of her masterpieces (and it works even better as a segment in her novel WISE BLOOD), but it really is ripe with a contempt for humanity.

Oh, but I’m possibly making it sound as if I don’t like O’Connor, as if she’s some drag. She’s not. Few writers are as darkly funny, as quick to pop every imaginable pretension in the service of truth, and few writers are as interesting. As Harold Bloom once pointed out about her less than charitable view of the human race, you simply have to accept that O’Connor sees you as one of the damned, and then you can enjoy her. Another way to put this is that you can savor O’Connor’s talent for constantly pointing out the absurdity and hypocrisy of others as long as you’re aware that she wouldn’t cut you any slack, either.

What does it say about her that you have to make that bargain? The woman herself is lost to the fiction she created. O’Connor’s personality wasn’t nearly as large as her fiction. “There won’t be any biographies of me,” she once claimed “because lives spent between the house and the chicken yard don’t make for exciting copy.” She seems to retreat to the back of the room and stare at us over her glasses, muttering under her breath about hell and sin and God’s terrible grace. Despite the admirable biographical work that’s been published, what she was actually like remains cloaked in time, that great devourer of all but a few personalities.

What we have left are her stories, their perfect construction, their craftsmanlike prose (O’Connor wrote the cleanest sentences in the business), and their humor. And, every so often, their humanity. When you read something like “Good Country People” you can’t help but feel sorry for Hulga, the one-legged atheist. Her seduction by a Bible-selling nihilist named Manly Pointer is viewed by the author as a rightful comeuppance, but Hulga is a sad figure nevertheless.

The most striking element of the story for me is the scene where Hulga and Manly Pointer are in the barn. They’ve retreated there for a little good, old fashioned sinning. But when they kiss there’s a curious disconnect. There’s nothing erotic about it. In fact, I can’t think of a single erotic moment in any of O’Connor’s work. For that matter, I can’t think of a single moment of unfettered tenderness in O’Connor’s fiction. You read her work and it’s possible to ask yourself: did Flannery O’Connor ever kiss a boy? There’s nothing in “Good Country People” to indicate the author ever snuck out to the barn for some sweaty necking. In fact, there’s nothing in her work as a whole which would indicate O’Connor ever regarded physical interaction with anything other than suspicion. In A PRAYER JOURNAL, she writes disdainfully of sex and only a slightly less disdainfully of romance. “Man’s desire for God is bedded in his unconscious and seeks to satisfy itself in the physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after.” For O’Connor, sex seemed nothing more than a temptation to be avoided. (The funniest lines in her prayer journal: “Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.”) To judge by her fiction, her revulsion at  the natural world only grew stronger once she became ill with the lupus that would claim her life when she was thirty-nine.

When a reader engages with her fiction, one is in the company of an imagination shaped, at least in part, by religious fanaticism. That’s not a negative judgment. O’Connor possibly would not be as great a writer if not for that fanaticism. Her imagination is, after all, twisted. All I know of how she saw the world is how she wrote about it, and she wrote about it like it was a carnival of freaks.

It’s telling, perhaps, that her most overtly sexual story is a) called “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” and b) climaxes in a sad, scary scene with an intersex person used as a freak show hermaphrodite. Sex in her work always seems like a strange aberration, a disruption of the natural world rather than a part of it. Perhaps to the author it was. At one point in A PRAYER JOURNAL she records, “The desires of the flesh have been taken away from me. For how long I don’t know, but I hope forever. It is a great peace to be rid of them.” We can’t know how long her peaceful reprieve lasted, but for the remainder of her life her intellectual and emotional relationship to the desires of the flesh never seemed less than adversarial.

The publication of her prayer journal is a fascinating look inside the mind of a young writer who prayed, “I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.” At the very least, this prayer was answered.  

Ophüls Noir Part Two: Caught (1949)

I guess Max Ophüls was just too big for film noir. He was the premier artist of lushly romantic period pieces (Letter From An Unknown Woman, Madame de…, Lola Montès), and those are the films for which he is remembered today. Most people don’t even realize that in 1949 he made two film noirs back to back, nor do they realize that these two films represent exactly half of his American output. Wedged between Letter From An Unknown Lady in 1948 and La Ronde in 1950, these two B-movies have been largely overlooked by critics in favor of Ophüls’ more celebrated work.

The irony of this neglect is that The Reckless Moment and Caught are both brilliant film noirs. Each feature Ophüls’ celebrated mise-en-scène and camera work, and each feature strong female protagonists. Of the two films, The Reckless Moment is tighter and more controlled, but Caught darker and deeper.

It tells the story of a poor young woman named Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes). Her big dream is to meet Mr. Right, preferably a rich Mr. Right. She takes modeling and charm school lessons, and then one day she lucks out when the slimy personal assistant to a millionaire sees her modeling fur coats at a department store and invites her to a yacht party. Leonora is so turned off by this creepy little guy’s insinuating manner—he essentially treats her like a self-deluded prostitute—she almost doesn’t go to the party. At her roommate’s prodding she changes her mind, but it’s unclear exactly why she changes her mind. Leonora is funny that way. She doesn’t want to be treated like a prostitute, but she does want to get on that boat and maybe catch herself a millionaire.

She never makes it to the boat, though, because she runs into the millionaire on the docks, and he invites her along for a ride in his convertible. His name is Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), and he is a hulking mass of money and nerves. He doesn’t so much sweep Leonora off her feet as much as he decides to buy her. In no time at all, they’re married and completely miserable. Smith seems to detest Leonora for merely existing, convinced that she only married him for his money. Leonora professes her love for him, but the fact is, she did marry him for his money. However, when Smith humiliates her in front of his drinking buddies one night, Leonora leaves him and gets a job as a receptionist for a pediatrician named Larry Quinada (James Mason). She and the good doctor soon fall in love, but Smith starts poking around, threatening to make trouble for both of them. Then Leonora discovers she’s pregnant with Smith’s child.

I have to tread carefully over plot details here because part of the power of the last act of Caught is its surprising attitude toward this pregnancy. The audience isn’t happy that Leonora is pregnant with Smith’s child, and neither is she or Quinada. Smith is happy because it gives him a way to “break” Lenora. He tells her that if she doesn’t come back to him, he’ll take the child away from her in court. Smith (who was reportedly modeled after Howard Hughes) is one sick bastard of a man. Why does he want Leonora back? Because she doesn’t want to come back. He just wants to break her. The movie finds a way to resolve this showdown, but the last few minutes of the movie are shocking. In today’s Hollywood, a movie studio would never allow a film to have such an ending. I can’t image what people must have thought in 1949.

The film was based on a novel by Libbie Block, with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents. This was much tinkering on the film—especially the ending—by the studio and the censors, but film that emerged is a fascinating piece of work. Ophüls was known as one the great “women’s directors”, but a better way to phrase, really, would be that he was one of the first feminist directors. Leonora’s quest to find a husband is a set up for her brutal awakening. What does she want? Why does she want it? She will have to confront her own underlying assumptions about marriage and motherhood before the movie is over.

Ophüls’ direction is superb. Here was a director. His camera glides back and forth throughout the film but never simply for the sake of being flashy. Look at the scene of Leonora and Quinada out on their date, jostled on the dance floor, deciding that maybe they’re in love, and notice how the camera finds them at all the right times. Or look at the scene of Quinada and his partner at the doctor’s office after Leonora has run off, the camera swooping back and forth between them as they talk, Leonora’s empty desk between them highlighting the power of her absence.

For all its virtues, the film does have flaws. The last two or three minutes feel awfully rushed—as evidenced by a clumsy inserted shot of Bel Geddes that looks like it’s from a completely different film stock. And I couldn’t help but think that an opportunity had been missed in the casting. Robert Ryan played a psycho better than anyone, but it might have interesting to see Mason tackle the role of Smith Ohlrig. I mean, James Mason just looked and sounded like a guy named Smith Ohlrig. He does a serviceable job as Quinada, but Ryan would have brought more warmth to the role.

As Leonora, however, Barbara Bel Geddes is simply wonderful. An accomplished stage actress, Bel Geddes never made the big splash in the movies that she should have. Today she’s mostly remembered for her television role as the mother on Dallas, but for movie fans she’ll always be Jimmy Stewart’s lovelorn friend Midge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She also appeared in a few noirs (Panic In The Streets, Fourteen Hours), as well as Robert Wise’s terrific Western-Noir Blood On The Moon. With her spunk and palpable intelligence, Bel Geddes is a welcome addition to any movie, and she positively anchors Caught. Leonora could be played on two different extremes, either as coy or as self-pitying. Instead, Bel Geddes makes her a woman wrestling with her own sense of self. Her choice between Smith and Quinada isn’t simply a choice between two men or even two ways of life. It’s a choice between two Leonoras.

***
The AFI in Silver Spring Maryland is currently having a Ophüls retrospective. The noir portion is over I'm afraid, but they're still showing some of his later, greater masterpieces. Here's the information on the films and show times.

Here's another look at Caught, including some great stills.

CAUGHT (1949)

I guess Max Ophüls was just too big for film noir. He was the premier artist of lushly romantic period pieces (LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, MADAME DE…, LOLA MONTES), and those are the films for which he is remembered today. Many people don’t even realize that in 1949 he made two film noirs back to back, nor do they realize that these two films represent exactly half of his American output. Wedged between LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN in 1948 and LA RONDE in 1950, these two B-movies have been largely overlooked by critics in favor of Ophüls’ more celebrated work.

The irony of this neglect is that THE RECKLESS MOMENT and CAUGHT are both brilliant film noirs. Each feature his celebrated mise-en-scène and camera work, and each feature strong female protagonists. Of the two films, THE RECKLESS MOMENT is tighter and more controlled, but CAUGHT darker and deeper.

It tells the story of a poor young woman named Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes). Her big dream is to meet Mr. Right, preferably a rich Mr. Right. She takes modeling and charm school lessons, and then one day she lucks out when the slimy personal assistant to a millionaire sees her modeling fur coats at a department store and invites her to a yacht party. Leonora is so turned off by the creepy little assistant’s insinuating manner—he essentially treats her like a self-deluded prostitute—she almost doesn’t go to the party. At her roommate’s prodding she changes her mind, but it’s unclear exactly why she changes her mind. Leonora is funny that way. She doesn’t want to be treated like a prostitute, but she does want to get on that boat and maybe catch herself a millionaire.

She never makes it to the boat, though, because she runs into the millionaire on the docks, and he invites her along for a ride in his convertible. His name is Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), and he is a hulking mass of money and nerves. He doesn’t so much sweep Leonora off her feet as much as he makes a snap decision to buy her. In no time at all, they’re married and completely miserable. Smith seems to detest Leonora for merely existing, convinced that she only married him for his money. Leonora professes her love for him, but the fact is, she did marry him for his money. However, when Smith humiliates her in front of his drinking buddies one night, Leonora leaves him and gets a job as a receptionist for a pediatrician named Larry Quinada (James Mason). She and the good doctor soon fall in love, but Smith starts poking around, threatening to make trouble for both of them. Then Leonora discovers she’s pregnant with Smith’s child.

I have to tread carefully over plot details here because part of the power of the last act of CAUGHT is its surprising attitude toward this pregnancy. The audience isn’t happy that Leonora is pregnant with Smith’s child, and neither is she. Smith is happy because it gives him a way to “break” Lenora. He tells her that if she doesn’t come back to him, he’ll take the child away from her in court. Smith (who was reportedly modeled after Howard Hughes) is one sick bastard of a man. Why does he want Leonora back? Because she doesn’t want to come back. He just wants to break her. CAUGHT finds a way to resolve this showdown, but the last few minutes of the movie are shocking. In today’s Hollywood, a movie studio would never allow a film to have such an ending. I can’t image what people must have thought in 1949.      

The film was based on a novel by Libbie Block, with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents. There was much tinkering on the film—especially the ending—by the studio and the censors, but the film that emerged is a fascinating piece of work. Ophüls was known as a “woman’s director,” but a better way to phrase, really, would be that he was one of the first feminist directors. Leonora’s quest to find a husband is a set up for her brutal awakening. What does she want? Why does she want it? She will have to confront her own underlying assumptions about marriage and motherhood before the movie is over.

Ophüls’s direction is superb. Here was a director. His camera glides back and forth throughout the film but never simply for the sake of being flashy. Look at the scene of Leonora and Quinada out on their date, jostled on the dance floor, deciding that maybe they’re in love, and notice how the camera finds them at all the right times. Or look at the scene of Quinada and his partner at the doctor’s office after Leonora has run off, the camera swooping back and forth from each man as they talk, Leonora’s empty desk between them highlighting the power of her absence.

For all its virtues, the film does have flaws. The last two or three minutes feel awfully rushed—as evidenced by a clumsily inserted shot of Bel Geddes that looks like it’s from a completely different film stock. And I can’t help but think that an opportunity was missed in the casting. Robert Ryan played a psycho better than anyone, but it might have interesting to see Mason tackle the role of Smith Ohlrig. I mean, James Mason just looks and sounds like a guy named Smith Ohlrig. He does a serviceable job as Quinada, but Ryan could have brought more warmth to that role.   

As Leonora, however, Barbara Bel Geddes is simply wonderful. An accomplished stage actress, Bel Geddes never made the big splash in the movies that she should have. Today she’s mostly remembered for her television role as the mother on DALLAS, but for movie fans she’ll always be Jimmy Stewart’s lovelorn friend Midge in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO. She also appeared in a few noirs (PANIC IN THE STREETS, FOURTEEN HOURS), as well as Robert Wise’s terrific noirish western BLOOD ON THE MOON. With her tomboy spunk and palpable intelligence, Bel Geddes is a welcome addition to any movie, and she positively anchors CAUGHT. Leonora could be played at two different extremes, either as coy or as self-pitying. Instead, Bel Geddes makes her a woman wrestling with her own sense of self. Her choice between Smith and Quinada isn’t simply a choice between two men or even two ways of life. It’s a choice between two Leonoras.

Note: I originally posted this back in 2009, but I'm reposting it here because CAUGHT will be showing at Doc Films this Friday at 7:30 and Sunday at 1:30. The film is part of the Women's Picture Noir programmed by Kathleen Geier. For more details click here.