SOURCE: "Ophuls and Authorship: A Reading of The Reckless Moment," in Film Criticism, Vol. XI, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 21-7.

[In the following essay, Morrison defends Ophuls's The Reckless Moment from critic Laura Mulvey's assertion that it depicts its female characters as passive.]

Max Ophuls' last American film, The Reckless Moment (1949), deploys the smooth tracking-shots and dense mise-en-scène that are the hallmarks of his style. But far from setting comfortably into its studied pose as a conventionally opulent "woman's" picture, The Reckless Moment ultimately subverts both those conventions and its own surface opulence. The sedately subversive presentation of the female figure in the film suggests answers to the many questions hovering over Ophuls' work in particular and the Hollywood melodrama in general. Indeed, if one were to engage in the difficult task of rescuing mainstream Hollywood film from Laura Mulvey's wholesale condemnation of it ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"), The Reckless Moment would surely be one of the crucial films to examine.

The Reckless Moment not only provides a critique of the domestic structure of patriarchy but calls into question visual pleasure as it is frequently constructed in mainstream narrative cinema. In her essay, Mulvey grants the existence of Hollywood films "with a woman as main protagonist" (12), but her call for the dismantling of classical film form because of its insistence on the passivity of the female protagonist clearly indicates her view that even these films reduce the woman to a mere vessel for sadistic, and explicitly male, voyeurism. The Reckless Moment depicts the dialectical struggle between the female and the patriarchy for control of the monolithic cinematic form that engulfs both. The woman's refusal to allow herself to be made an icon, to surrender herself to the status of image into which a moment's passivity would freeze her, illustrates one moment when the Hollywood cinema contradicts Mulvey's characterization of it.

The Reckless Moment begins with a few static shots of the marina near which the Harpers, an upper-middle-class California family, live; over these shots, we hear a narrative voice, in a tone that only in retrospect sounds thin, snide, detached, ironic. The conventionality of the device—a serene voice accompanying serene pictures to situate us in the diegesis, to tell us that a story follows and that the serenity is about to be displaced—hurries us past the uneasy underpinnings of the convention itself. In an essay that attempts to link theoretical problems of voice-over narration in film to the unsettling absence so much psychoanalytic film theory has emphasized, Mary Ann Doane argues that the "traditional use of voice-off constitutes a denial of the frame as a limit and an affirmation of the unity and homogeneity of the depicted space" (37-38). Her examples of non-traditional voiceoffs, however, seem to prove the opposite. The narrator introducing The Reckless Moment, for example, seems more "traditional" than the Joe Gillis character's famous introduction to Sunset Boulevard (1950), since Gillis, who initiates the story, is already dead when it begins. In the case of Sunset Boulevard, where the facts of the narrative displace the voice that seemed to inaugurate it, this refusal to use the voice-over as a conventional "framing" device emphasizes the continuity between spatial and temporal modes of narrativity. That anonymous voice is finally attached to someone who participates in the story, and the voice, after its first grim trick, adheres from then on to the rules imposed by the narrative.

No such attachment is provided in The Reckless Moment. The voice may be that of an implied third-person narrator, or it may be that of the contemptible Nagel (Roy Roberts), or the voice of the absent father, which intrudes by telephone in the course of the film but which we are never permitted to hear. The point, of course, is that we do not know. The voice emerges not from some cosily non-diegetic space but from some space, untraceable and ineffable, of pure diegesis. In this same offscreen space one might locate the impulse to turn the female figure into an erotic image awaiting the "inscription" of the male gaze. Here, indeed, begins Lucia Harper's (Joan Bennett) struggle against the threat of such conversion.

That voice, genteel, distasteful, disembodied, wholly unsympathetic, speaks only a few sentences, then half of a last sentence. That is all, in fact, that Lucia Harper will permit the voice before she takes over with the maternal authority she exerts throughout the film: she finishes the sentence that the voice-over narrator has begun. With disquieting suddenness, then, we are in the story, whose propulsion Lucia has already usurped from another who might lay claim to authorship. The struggle of The Reckless Moment is precisely the struggle for authorship. Ophuls dramatizes Lucia's repeated efforts to author her own "texts," even in confrontation with the whole body of patriarchal conventions, including the conventions of classical film narration.

After a brief interchange between Lucia and her son,' there follows a sequence depicting Lucia's journey into the city to meet Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick). Instead of a cut from the Harpers' suburban home to the seedy hotel where Lucia meets Darby, Ophuls gives us a series of prolonged tracking-shots which insist on the journey itself. Ophuls' technique here is closely related to the question of Lucia's "authorship." What, simply, is the ideological result of character positioning from a technical perspective? Brian Henderson distinguishes the tracking-shots of Ophuls from those of Godard in an effort to answer just this question. Implicit in Henderson's distinction is an acceptance of the Bazinian line of approach that suggests that the long-take, reliant on depthof-field compositions, promotes the illusion that screen space is merely a continuation of real ("bourgeois") space. Henderson finds that, on the contrary, Godard's lateral-tracking shots, though they are part of a long-take style, promote "critical distance" (3): since we concentrate not on the depth of a static frame but on the possibilities of that frame's continuing reorientation, and since the content of the frame "does not move in relation to the camera's movement" (2), the rejection of multiple planes of the lateral-tracking shot represents "a demystification, an assault on the bourgeois world-view and self-image" (8).

Ophuls' tracking-shots, Henderson goes on, are unlike Godard's: "Ophuls tracks in order to follow his characters, to give them movement or to attend their movement. His tracks center on, are filled with, derive life and motion from his characters, that is, from individuals . . . Ophuls' tracks are essentially uncritical of their subjects" (3). Ophuls' shots tend, indeed, to enunciate authorial sympathy and spectator identification with the character whose motion the shot follows.² Ophuls' moving camera makes clear Lucia Harper's active force in The Reckless Moment, both in its repeated tracking-shots that follow her and in its refusal to follow any other characters until the appearance of Martin Donnelly (James Mason). Until then the camera serves only Lucia, and Lucia occupies dominant positions within the frame. From Donnelly's appearance until his death, the formal structure of the film is that of a duel for the camera's favor. I am not suggesting that The Reckless Moment is a film self-reflexive to the extent that its characters are aware of their status as characters and rebellious against it. Rather, I suggest that Ophuls' critique of domestic structure manifests itself in subtle and formally constructed terms.

The world of The Reckless Moment, glimmering with the residue of a patriarchy temporarily in abeyance (with Tom Harper, the father and husband, away on business for Christmas week), remains a non-sexual one. The lynch-pin of the plot is the relationship between Lucia's daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks) and the unsavory Ted Darby, with whom Bea has become involved in the decadent city where she attends "art college." Yet this relationship, which leads to the "murder" that propels the story, partakes only of the trappings of sexuality: Lucia's offer of money to Darby if he will stay away from Bea, the suburbanite's effort to buy off corruption; the furtive but decidedly chaste midnight tryst between Bea and Darby before he is killed. It is, however, understood by everybody—by Bea and Lucia as well as by the audience—that sex is not at all at issue in this relationship. After the sequence of workmanlike angles/reverse-angles during which Darby, meeting with Lucia, agrees to take her money, the emotionally bedraggled Lucia returns home to confer with Bea. During this sequence, Bea's naive insistence on her "friendship" with "Ted" reveals that she has never even considered the possibility of a sexual component in their relationship. Ironically, if Lucia escapes conversion into a female icon in the film, Bea undergoes just such a conversion in this sequence. Although Lucia's every action is evidently meant to protect her daughter from the forces of corruption, the innocent Bea is looked at here as a classic female image: she is seen in medium-long-shot, the shadowed arch of a painting easel interposed between her and the camera, the slight low-angle and delicate chiaroscuro informing the camera's gaze at her in an erotic way that recurs nowhere, with no other character, in the film. Indeed, as the story progresses, Bea herself drops from the film, even though her place in its events remain central.

If sexuality is not at stake, then what is? Lucia Harper and her husband have, we understand, repeatedly warned Bea about the dangers of the city, here embodied by Darby. Only with the greatest reluctance have the Harpers permitted Bea to go off to "art college" in the first place. At the beginning of the film, Lucia's instinct seems to be to guard Bea from the vague, demiurgical corruption that Darby comes to represent. Bea is anything but passive in this confrontation with her mother: she flatly refuses to believe that Darby was willing to accept Lucia's money, and she struts about the room with airy authority, telling her mother what's what. One of the muted ironies of Ophuls' film involves Bea's metamorphosis from the active principle she is in this sequence—she enacts, after all, the first of the "reckless moments" the film depicts—into the passive and speechless figure she ultimately becomes.

Although Lucia means to usurp a stance from which she might author her own "texts," she usurps from within the structure she does not at first recognize as stifling her. Primary among the texts she authors during the course of the film are her communications to her husband, by turns teasing, passionate, desperate, duplicitous, and solicitous. The action of The Reckless Moment is bracketed by sequences involving Tom Harper's long-distance calls from abroad. In both cases, the camera remains with Lucia in her bedroom when she is called to the phone, following her descent of the stairs and fixing on her as she speaks. At the beginning of the film, the camera's formally elegant motions accommodate completely her simultaneously wistful and exuberant gestures. Not only does she fully command the objectified other the cinematic apparatus represents, but her phone conversation paints for her husband a false picture of what is going on at home. Thus, Lucia is in control here. The son and the father-in-law, meanwhile, pace rambunctiously but ineffectually back and forth during the conversation, in and out of the frame. The ineffectuality of this adolescent-male gesture is made clear by the camera's refusal to follow it: Ophuls' usually mobile camera, because it is now bound to the controlling female, takes this opportunity to qualify its own penchant for the tracking-shot.

Lucia next writes a letter to her husband, no doubt intending to clarify some of the half-truths she constructed on the phone. She writes two versions of the letter; in the first, she laments her own parental inadequacy. ("If only I were one of those humorous, tolerant mothers in plays and books, but I'm not . . ."); finally, she discards this letter in favor of one that simply professes her love, implying that everything will be all right when Tom returns. In Lucia's last conversation with her husband, where she still manipulates the truth, this sentiment will be fully revealed as hollow when she repeats it under far more exacerbating circumstances.

Intercut with the sequence in which Lucia writes the letters is Bea's meeting in the boathouse with Darby. Lucia's most elaborate act of authorship in the film is that of Darby's murder. It is not, after all, a murder at all: on discovering that Darby has actually accepted Lucia's offer of money, the frustrated Bea deals him a blow which staggers him and causes him, after Bea has run off, to fall to his death from the balcony of the boathouse. Lucia, in effect, creates the murder—even if in part to circumvent the authority of the "texts" authored by her daughter, mysteriously incriminating letters to Darby. Ophuls, indeed, emphasizes this creation. When she comes upon the scene of the crime, Lucia is guided by her own flashlight which, in turn, directs the gaze of the camera, and, as she surveys the scene, she is granted the only subjective shots in the film: a point-of-view low-angle shot of the smashed wooden railing of the balcony, and a point-of-view long-shot down the beach as she tries to determine whether anyone is watching her. Once dead, Darby is of so little consequence that the shots of Lucia dragging his body to the boat pointedly exclude him, even though doing so means flagrantly defying Hollywood framing conventions. We get, during this sequence, only extreme close-ups of Lucia's face as she struggles with Darby's dead weight. The act of covering up the death, thus creating the murder, is painstakingly drawn out in these shots and in the subsequent ones of Lucia driving the boat to the middle of the lake to dispose of the body.³

Images of driving in The Reckless Moment take on extraordinary force. Freud, of course, associates driving with "masculine" activity, but in The Reckless Moment such activity becomes a working-out of the power to will "texts." In the first half of the film, Lucia drives endlessly, the camera following her; in the second half, Donnelly takes over the driving. En route to one of the shady meetings, Donnelly insists on driving, and Lucia reluctantly assents but then bitterly retorts mid-way through the trip that she should have been the one to drive.

In one sense, the film's structure corresponds to classical Hollywood melodrama. Lucia is subjected to a series of trials and makes a series of wrong but nobly motivated decisions in the face of them.⁴ Although Lucia gains her authority in the name of the father-centered family, the movement of the film calls into question the domestic structures in which she nonetheless continues to operate. Once Donnelly enters the film, the struggle for authority becomes reoriented. In his framing, Ophuls makes us repeatedly aware of this agon. In the sequence introducing Donnelly, during which he reveals his participation in the plot to blackmail Lucia, Ophuls organizes the frame around three types of shots: those in which the frame is halved by an object in the foreground—a lamp or a table—with Lucia and Donnelly occupying equal positions in separate halves; those in which Donnelly occupies a position of spatial superiority, looming in relation to one another, as if vying for position. In the car as they drive to meet the extortionist Nagel, Lucia tells Donnelly, "You don't know how a family can surround you at times." He replies, "No." A moment later, Donnelly asks, "Do you never get away from your family?" and the verbal positions are reversed as Lucia answers, "No." When Donnelly states what might be the film's thesis—"You're quite a prisoner, aren't you?—Lucia moves most unnaturally to eclipse him in the shot as she turns and answers, "I don't feel like one."

Donnelly's appearance also reorients the film in terms of narrative point-of-view. Once he enters, as the amoral but gentle male whose supposed threat might in fact have been her salvation, Lucia's place at the center of the film becomes less certain. If the film began with our following Lucia as she entered scenes of ongoing action, we now enter them, in the last half of the film, before her, and follow Donnelly away from them. After the first scene between them, for example, the camera follows Donnelly as he leaves, and this shot is followed by a cut to the dining-room where the meal is already in progress as Lucia enters.

Donnelly, like Lucia, operates from within the social structures he gradually begins to challenge. Not only does he continue to act as an extortionist after he has renounced his own claims to the money, but his desexualized adoration of Lucia appears to originate in the very quality of hers (commitment to domesticity) that has been, by the end of the film, subverted—and, indeed, Donnelly serves as an agent of this subversion. As Robin Wood puts it, "Donnelly, while fully aware that Lucia's family imprisons her, falls in love with her precisely because of her devotion to them" (184). If the film works as a duel between Lucia and Donnelly, the final triumph is Donnelly's: with his last noble lie, telling the authorities before his death that he killed Darby, he ultimately seizes the power to will "texts" for which they have been struggling.

Even so, The Reckless Moment is not one of the many examples of the Hollywood film which initially gives women the possibility of genuine authority only to snatch it away at the last minute. Ophuls' film not only systematically undercuts the erotic imagism typical of the genre in which it operates, but subtly subverts the didactic function of the tragedy with which the film ends. In the last sequence, Lucia goes to the phone to talk to her husband. She is stricken with grief over Donnelly's death, and, although she speaks cheerfully to Tom, she weeps. The stationary camera is placed behind the banister of the stairs. As Lucia speaks, she sinks from sight behind the bars of the staircase, rejecting for the last time the fixity of the camera's gaze upon her. Her son, meanwhile, stands facing both her and the camera, his expression one of profound perplexity and surprise at the grief his mother is openly displaying. Lucia, in the end, shares Donnelly's ironic triumph: she recognizes at last the bars that imprison her.

NOTES

¹ Lucia brushes aside her son's questions and orders him to clothe himself (he is not wearing a shirt). Thus, as Robin Wood points out, Lucia is both an agent of repression and an oppressed woman.

² In his doctoral thesis on Ophuls, Alan Williams makes use of Raymond Bellour's reading of The Big Sleep (1946), in which Bellour discusses audience identification and authorial enunciation as a function of the film apparatus. Williams' thesis, however, prevents him from paying much attention to The Reckless Moment. See Alan Williams, Max Ophuls and the Cinema of Desire (SUNYAB, 1977) and Raymond Bellour, "The Obvious and the Code," Screen 15 (Winter 1974-75), no. 4, 7-17.

³ Wood suggests that this sequence is modelled on Hitchcock; much in The Reckless Moment, however, reminds me of the later Psycho (1960): the long sequences of driving, the desperate "cleaning up" of the transgression of the daughter in The Reckless Moment and the mother in Psycho.

⁴ In one sense, the film belongs to a sub-genre of melodrama, that in which a powerful woman subordinates a weaker one. Other examples are Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945) and Vincent Sherman's The Hard Way (1943). In another sense, The Reckless Moment provides a neat bridge between the categories of Freudian "woman's" melodrama of the 1940's and the domestic melodrama of the 1950's; these categories are noted by Thomas Elsaesser in "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Movies and Methods, vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), 167.

WORKS CITED

Doane, Mary Ann. "The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space." Yale French Studies 60, n. 1.

Henderson, Brian. "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style." Film Quarterly 24, Winter 1970-71, n. 2.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16, Autumn 1975, n. 3.

Wood, Robin. Personal Views. London: Fraser, 1976.