Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 233: Tue Aug 23

The Reckless Moment (Ophüls, 1949): Garden Cinema, Covent Garden, 8.30pm

Chicago Reader review:
This 1949 melodrama from Max Ophuls's postwar Hollywood period is usually overlooked in favor of the masterpieces he would realize upon returning to Europe (
Lola Montes, The Earrings of Madame de . . . ). But it's one of the director's most perverse stories of doomed love, with Joan Bennett as a bored middle-class housewife whose daughter accidentally kills her sleazy suitor, and James Mason as an engagingly exotic Irishman who attempts to blackmail the mother. Naturally, they feel a certain attraction. Ophuls spins a network of fine irony out of the lurid material; Bennett is surprisingly effective as a typical Ophuls heroine, discovering a long-suppressed streak of masochism.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is Mark Cousins' introduction to the film on the sadly missed Moviedrome television series.
 

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