SOURCE: "Lucia Harper's Crime: Family Melodrama and Film Noir in The Reckless Moment," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1989, pp. 261-67.

[In the following essay, Lang identifies elements of film noir and family melodrama used by Ophuls in his film The Reckless Moment.]

In his book, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, Barry Salt concludes with a "Stylistic Analysis of the Films of Max Ophuls." In the half-page that he devotes to The Reckless Moment, Salt does not adequately explain why this film released in 1949 should have been Ophuls's most successful American production, but he does observe that Ophuls's films attracted some comment at the time they were made, because stylistically "Ophuls went that little bit further.¹The Reckless Moment's commercial and critical success is explained vaguely in terms of "the extra complexities of attitudes and behavior of the principal characters," and it is described as an "original combination of at least two sub-genres, namely the 'lady in a jam' type of thriller, and the 'mother coping in husband's absence' domestic drama which was common during World War II."

True enough, in The Reckless Moment, Lucia Harper/Joan Bennett is a lady in a jam and a mother coping in her husband's absence, but Ophuls effectively combines family melodrama and film noir in a way that profoundly contradicts Salt's later remark that "the really distinctive thing about Max Ophuls's films is that there is nothing underneath the superficially present concerns."² Salt seems to make the mistake of drawing an equation between what he calls "the shallowness of many of the heroines of Max Ophuls's films," and a moral shallowness that he ascribes to the director's work. The Reckless Moment (which is not an atypical film in Ophuls's oeuvre) is one of the most radical critiques of the patriarchal family to be found in the American cinema, and it is clear evidence that Ophuls's attitude towards women is complex, perceptive, and sympathetic.

As Salt observes,

The relation between the small-time criminal world and that of suburban domesticity is of the essence, and the transitions between these two worlds form a major element of the film. The rushes the mother makes from one to the other—from the house to the city, or from the house to the boat-house with the blackmailer in it—are very present visually as well as thematically.³

This division between two worlds that is so clearly articulated in the film is basic to its structure as a melodrama, but, remarkably, while it is officially committed to Lucia's world of familial values and is set up to critique the noir world that the blackmailer Donnelly comes from, it is obvious that both worlds are morally bankrupt. The film's supreme irony is that Donnelly sacrifices himself for Lucia's rotten family just at the point where she is ready at last to sacrifice the family for him.

While The Reckless Moment is unmistakably a film noir, it is marked by a difference: Lucia Harper is drawn into a criminal demi-monde not because she is a femme fatale in the noir tradition of evil, dissimulating women, but because in her husband's absence she exercises patriarchal functions. Working within the conventions of the melodrama, Ophuls encourages us to empathize with Lucia in her predicament, but he makes us clearly aware of the limitations of her imagination and vision by setting up between audience and heroine a balance of identification and detachment that is uniquely poised. Lucia fails consistently, for example, to realize that Sybil is the most intelligent character in the film and should be her close friend and confidante. She can only see her as her black maid. While Lucia is essentially blameless (can she be blamed for lacking imagination? for being blinded by convention?) she is driven to committing an actual crime because, as in so many films noirs, the moral order is thrown out of balance by the literally or metaphorically absent father. In its function as a melodrama to create a morally legible universe in which good and evil are clearly articulated, the film refers to a certain kind of family that society holds up as the ideal configuration, the best structure, for the organization of power and desire, but it critiques that family severely.

The American cinema has always been obsessed with the underlying theme of the absent Father, or more precisely the theme of the restoration of the Father. As Robin Wood has written, it is "the dominant project . . . of the contemporary Hollywood cinema, a veritable thematic metasystem embracing all the available genres and all the current cycles, from realist drama to pure fantasy, taking in en route comedy and film noir and even in devious ways infiltrating the horror film."⁴ Wood is referring to the Hollywood cinema "from Vietnam to Reagan," but the theme goes back to the commercial cinema's beginnings, with its narrative requirement of order and closure (the "Father" put back in "his" place) after a series of melodramatic ruptures.⁵ The restoration of the Father has in this sense always been the American cinema's dominant project, which a brief elaboration by Wood of the term should begin to make clear:

The Father must here be understood in all senses, symbolic, literal, potential: patriarchal authority (the Law), which assigns all other elements to their correct, subordinate, allotted roles; the actual heads of families, fathers of recalcitrant children, husbands of recalcitrant wives, who must either learn the virtue and justice of submission or pack their bags; the young heterosexual male, father of the future, whose eventual union with the "good woman" has always formed the archetypal happy ending of the American film, guarantee of the perpetuation of the nuclear family and social stability.⁶

After World War II, as The Reckless Moment suggests, the restoration of women (to the home, mainly, and to all that it represents for women in patriarchal culture) vividly ramifies the theme of the restoration of the Father. The very obvious opportunity with which wars provide narratives to remove literal fathers from actual families only clarifies the nature of the repressive patriarchal structures which persist in peacetime, when fathers are not corporeally absent.

The film is singlemindedly concerned to present the patriarchal nuclear family as a thoroughly repressive institution, especially with respect to its positioning of women, but it achieves this in a strikingly ironic mode. We get the theme of the woman's lack of access to economic power, a theme of course crucial to the woman's melodrama as a genre, but it is rendered here with unusual explicitness. With Mr. Harper away, the Harper family is invaded by "noir" elements which spread their evil like a cancer, perverting all desires and giving power to the wrong people, and Lucia Harper's mounting desperation is given its keen edge by the great difficulty she has in raising the ransom money that Nagel (through Donnelly) demands. Lucia Harper's incomplete family, like a sick body missing an organ, is weakened and exposed to the threat of more thorough corruptions. But when the noir "evil" departs from the scene, the "normal" state to which Lucia's family is returned is clearly only another nightmare.

By film noir standards neither the story nor the narrative structure of The Reckless Moment is particularly complex, although there are many richly detailed scenes that deliver the noir look and tone, through characteristically noir mise-en-scène, lighting, dialogue, and themes. As a family melodrama, of course, the film puts the nuclear family and the order of the middle-class community under threat. It is the oldest and most consistent theme in the American cinema, to which the film noir of the 1940s, signifying in this instance the impact of World War II on the American family, gives especially vivid expression. The Reckless Moment is exceptional, however, in its bleak irony, analyzable everywhere in its mise-en-scène, and most decisively in the overdetermination of the film's last shot.

At the beginning of the film, Lucia is seen leaving the island suburb of Balboa where she and her family live. As she crosses the bridge to the mainland, we sense that something is wrong. While the brilliant light of the sunny morning in Southern California suggests that all is well, Lucia Harper's sunglasses lend her a potentially sinister aspect. She is a well-dressed, trim, evidently respectable, bourgeois woman, but her sunglasses seem to be part of a disguise. They suggest that she is hiding something—that she does not want her eyes to betray her intentions.

Like most leading female characters in film noir, Lucia is a strong woman, but her strength, we discover, derives from her sense of responsibility as a mother, as head of a household, and as an upstanding member of a suburban community of families. It derives, such as it is, from her narrow-mindedness; it is the strength of self-righteousness. The difference between Joan Bennett's Lucia Harper and, for example, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, or Rita Hayworth in Lady From Shanghai, or Jane Greer in Out of the Past, lies in the way she uses her sexuality. Noir women usually generate their power and strength from their manipulation of men through sexual allure. Lucia's power is asexual. She relies less on the exaggeration of her femininity than on her sublimation of it. She smokes cigarettes neurotically, not as an aid to feminine allure; she wears glasses when she is doing business-like activities such as writing letters and making shopping lists; and she is seen several times behind her desk in an erect attitude of resolve, in spite of the difficulties she is facing alone in the absence of a patriarchal figure.

Bit by bit, however, Lucia Harper is drawn into a noir world, without ever becoming a noir character. The bar of the hotel in Los Angeles where she meets Ted Darby, the older man with whom her daughter Bee is having an affair, is a seedy place compared to other bars in noir films like Murder My Sweet, Out of the Past, Scarlet Street, and Phantom Lady. Moreover, it is fairly early in the day, and the bar-stools and chairs are upturned on tables, creating angular compositions and shadows that make Lucia look very much out of her element.

The unscrupulous Mr. Darby tries to make Lucia pay him to stop seeing her daughter. As the story gets darker, the film quite literally gets darker. In the critical scene in which Bee slips out of the house to meet Darby in the boathouse, the gloom of the shadowy stairway and the boathouse is intercut with shots of Lucia at her desk in her brightly-lit room, writing to her husband, " . . . if only you were here you would get rid of that beast." But Lucia tears up the letter and decides to tell him that all is well. At almost the precise moment that Lucia resolves to face the threat of Darby alone, Bee in the boathouse knocks Darby over the head with a flashlight in her rage and embarrassment at his attempt to blackmail her mother.

Both gestures (destroying the letter, and Bee's gesture that results in the accident that causes Darby's death) are reckless. They are examples of impulsive behavior that pretends control over the situation but actually avoids confrontation of it. When Bee comes rushing in from the boathouse, or when Lucia finds Ted Darby's body, Lucia decides to act in a way she obviously thinks men act—alone, and resolutely. She takes a role (the role of "the man of the house"), which turns out to be unwise. All her subsequent actions are based on the repression of the truth, and on the denial of the fact that she is not, and cannot be, the "father."

Repression, as Andrew Britton's 1976 Framework article on The Reckless Moment suggests, is the film's key issue.⁷ The bourgeois order of the middle-class family is founded on the negation of desire, and this is figured in the film as a theme that expands from Lucia's efforts to repress her daughter's sexuality. As Britton points out, it is the repression of the body, both literally and figuratively (in Lucia's hiding of Darby's corpse and, for example, in her nagging David constantly to put on more clothes and to "button up"), that gives the narrative its most comprehensive logic.

According to the only symbolic system families understand, Lucia now represents, for most intents and purposes, the (paternal) Law,⁸ which is why mother and daughter do such a bad job of communicating with each other. The moment Lucia takes the flashlight from Bee and refuses Sybil's offer to help, it becomes obvious that she is caught in an irreversible movement towards disaster. When Tom Harper was at home, Lucia was able to side with her daughter in the decision to send Bee to art school. But now, with Tom away, Lucia's role is changed, and she reproaches herself for having been "stupid and indulgent" in that decision.

When Lucia re-enters the house after dumping Darby's body in the bay, the camera follows her doggedly through various rooms to the kitchen—the "heart" of the home—where, like Lady Macbeth, whose interventions in a "masculine" sphere also result in catastrophe, Lucia's first impulse is to wash her hands. She loses her shopping list and worries that it might be on Darby's body, and David complains that the anchor (an aptly phallic symbol in this context) has been stolen.

The power of the crime to accelerate disorder, as always in film noir, starts to grow at once. When Lucia visits the Post Office the next day, she hears that the body has been found, and that it is headline news. At that moment Lucia is framed by the bars of the clerk's window, much as the vertical bars of the bannister cast a shadow on her the night before, when Darby died. The extreme pressure Lucia is under at this point is surely exaggerated by the fact that Christmas is approaching, a reference to which is condensed in the metonymy of the Christmas tree she has just picked up. Christmas is probably the worst time for anything to go wrong in a family, and the tree, of course, is a reminder of the holiday which it symbolizes and of how far the Harper family is from the state of grace which Christmas celebrates. As Noël Carroll has written,

Christmas is the day on which our culture celebrates the completion of its mythic first family. Because Christmas exists in large measure as a mass fantasy—inextricably bound up with childhood associations of the warmth, generosity, and security of the family—the holiday is one of the most potent symbols in Hollywood's arsenal. . . . Christmas imagery induces regression, rekindling childlike beliefs in social stability and community that grow out of idealizations of the family. . . . (Christmas) is a reaffirmation of the family and its role as the central and natural form of human relation.⁹

Never was Lucia's mind further from the question of whether to have a green or a blue Christmas tree. She has been drawn into a film noir; she is no longer in an ordinary family melodrama.

When Martin Donnelly appears on the scene to extort money from Lucia, the ugly business of discussing the blackmail terms takes place outside, in the shadows. Back inside, where it is brightly lit, we see the family sitting down for dinner. The two worlds—the world of the film noir, and the world of the family melodrama—are thus represented in background and foreground within the same frame. The one is paranoid, involving men, money, perverse sexuality, and sadistic power imbalances. The other is concerned with what is right and what is wrong, and with the prohibition and interdiction which keeps bourgeois morality in balance. (The two worlds, of course, look completely different.) The next day Lucia attempts to flood Bee's "guilt" away with light by flinging open the window blinds and insisting that Bee eat breakfast "like everybody else," and later she will lend Bee her fur coat ("It looks lovely on you!") in an effort to encourage her to go out more.

Donnelly at first appears to embody all the evil that is the antithesis of the insular community of Balboa. But just as Lucia is drawn deeper into the noir world, so Donnelly becomes more of a character from family melodrama. From the moment he enters the Harper home carrying the blackmail letters, Donnelly begins to enclose Lucia in ever-smaller spaces. Soon, on the ferry between the mainland and Balboa, they discuss the blackmail terms in Donnelly's car, where Lucia is a helpless passenger. The medium two-shot and close-ups of Donnelly and Lucia in his car talking are of the sort to be found in almost any film, but Lucia's diminishing freedom of movement, independence and confidence, are underscored by the confining effects of the scene. The same thing happens when she is forced to use a public call-box—a very small space, and one that has almost privileged status in film noir—and when she runs out of small change to pay for the call, she must ask Donnelly for more. He is concluding Lucia's shopping with all the appearance of a husband, and when Lucia asks the shopkeeper, "Did you remember to put in my father-in-law's razor blades?" the shopkeeper asks Donnelly, "Did we?"

Donnelly, as father/husband seeks (or offers, as his manly obligation) to control the situation, to take over for her. He is beginning to act like the priest his mother hoped he would become, like the husband he perhaps hopes he could be, mediating and controlling language, trying to convince Lucia that she should let him handle the problem of the ransom money. In the same movement, however, another imperative is applying its pressure: patriarchal ideology seeks to punish Lucia for her crime of assuming paternal functions. She must be made passive, restored to prison behind the bars of the confessional booth (to the role of guilty sinner), restored to the role of woman, mother, wife (in the home, in suburbia, in a family melodrama).

When, at one point, Donnelly remarks, "Bee's lucky to have a mother like you," Lucia retorts, "Everybody has a mother like me! You probably had one too!" We are witnessing a strange form of love story beginning on both sides. This is also an effort on the part of the film and its main characters to break from the entangling terms of the film noir—to normalize things, to get back to the less disturbing terrain of the family melodrama. When Donnelly later calls Lucia, he talks into the telephone softly, caressingly, like a lover. He is clearly in love with her, and he unconsciously attempts to restore a patriarchal order (i.e., the structure of the family melodrama) to a situation that was originally upset when Tom Harper went away and Bee took up with a man old enough to be her father.

The blackmailer's falling in love with Lucia is evidence of his desire to quit the underworld of the film noir and redeem himself by entering a family melodrama. He seeks to exchange the paranoid features of the noir world he inhabits for the terms of ordinary family life—which, to paraphrase Freud, will only offer him ordinary unhappiness. Donnelly, too, lacks imagination. He cannot see how sterile ordinary family life is; this is the film's extraordinary irony—that Donnelly identifies with Lucia. As he says to her, "You have your family, I have my Nagel." The film would appear to be saying that the family is a necessary or inevitable evil. The melodrama has always been crucially ambivalent about the familial structures that define it; in its progressive but contradictory way, the melodrama as a form desires the Law but detests its repressive functions.

The vacuum created by Tom Harper's absence cannot be successfully filled either by Lucia or by Donnelly, although his impulse now is to take that role. "If you do as I say," he tells her, "it'll be over for you." But Lucia cannot simply do as Donnelly says; she has a family to hold together. When young David asks, "Hey, mother! Can I have a dollar?" Lucia naturally asks, "A dollar? What for?" Which, ironically, is what she herself was asked at the loan company when she tried to raise the ransom money. Lucia was denied her loan, yet she must judge in Tom Harper's absence whether or not David needs the dollar, and must act in her husband's name—in the name of the Father.

In Lucia's pathetic efforts to raise the ransom money, we see how crippled and dependent she is as a woman in a bourgeois, patriarchal society. As she walks through an unfamiliar and noisy part of town to reach the loan company, her alienation is described by the steady gaze of a long tracking shot, and when she sells her jewelry to a pawnbroker, Lucia is not only framed by the bars on the pawnbroker's cash booth (as she was at the Post Office), but she starts to walk out of the shop before being reminded that this exchange includes a ticket to redeem her jewelry. She is out of place in the (masculine) world of the public sphere. She is not completely familiar with its language. As she says to the woman at the loan company, "I wish to make a loan, er . . . get a loan, I mean, make a loan," before she is forced to withdraw in defeat because the company will not give her the money without her husband's signature. Throughout these scenes Lucia is wearing her fur coat, an ironic symbol of the bourgeois woman's compensation in a patriarchal society for her lack of access to real economic power.

As a melodrama, The Reckless Moment seeks to critique the patriarchy, while showing Lucia Harper's strengths (and also her limits, and the barriers she will encounter). When Lucia goes to the boathouse to meet Donnelly's nasty cohort, Nagel, she goes alone, even though Sybil once again offers her help. The outside light, swinging in the wind, with dark shadows all around, is a superb noir image connoting tension and fear—a symbol of her attempt to endure disorder. When the film ends, however, Lucia will be returned to her "proper," "safe" place. Nagel's death and Donnelly's "confession" to the police signify the final departure of the noir evil that has plagued Balboa. The Harper family is returned to normal—but only by-suppressing everything.

As a melodrama the film cannot in the final analysis advocate a new scheme of things, although it is at every moment radically ironic. The film can only fall back on an apparent restoration of the old order, which has been discredited—revealed to be founded primarily on repression of female sexuality and subjectivity. When Tom Harper calls from Berlin, Lucia descends the stairway to answer the call. No shadows of the balustrade fall on her, but she is placed now quite literally behind its bars, in a tableau that visualizes Donnelly's perception that she is a "prisoner." The narrative is concluded with a seal of traditional order—reference to the Christmas tree, in a vapid conversation that overdetermines the sterility and emptiness of the family structure that Lucia has labored so hard to protect.

In this last shot Lucia clings desperately to the telephone receiver as she stifles her sobs, while young David, in a suit and tie that prefigures the patriarchal role that he is being propelled forward to assume, stares at his mother with some concern. Bee, who has just returned from the movies, is still wearing her mother's fur coat, which is another reminder that this bourgeois family is succeeding in reproducing itself, in spite of everything. Lucia Harper will not buck the patriarchal order again. She is repentant. As she said to Donnelly after he killed Nagel, "It was my way of doing something that made everything wrong!" and earlier, in the film's most bitterly ironic line: "There's nothing wrong that Tom's coming home won't cure!"

This kind of ending only pretends to capitulate to the patriarchal status quo, for Lucia's "capitulation" is overwhelmingly contradicted by most of the film. The melodrama, as I have suggested, is a form that combines both reactionary and progressive impulses, and this film, moreover, combines two genres—or rather, two versions of the same form: the film noir and the family melodrama. Film noir and family melodrama are both concerned to locate and articulate the "moral occult," which, in Peter Brooks's words, describes "the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality . . . a sphere of being where our most basic desires and interdictions lie. . . ."¹⁰ The film noir is the paranoid and "perverse" version of the melodramatic form that drives narrative contradictions to their impossible limits. (In this case, the discourse of the film noir is eliminated in the moment of Donnelly's violent death.) The discourse of the family melodrama, on the other hand, carries on. In some sense, it always "carries on," because it is a discourse grounded in the terms of the dominant ideology. Lucia Harper is restored to the home, and as a woman (i.e., in the terms by which the family melodrama identifies her) she will always be "guilty." She is guilty because she is not male, because in the psychoanalytic sense she is "castrated." But her guilt can be recuperated in her repression. In the narrative Lucia Harper goes free because Donnelly dies, but the tragedy of Donnelly's gesture is that it thrusts her back into her prison at the moment when she was ready to take the first step towards changing her condition.

The family melodrama, then (the American cinema's dominant "genre"), is the form that one could say most suited Ophuls in the end. To return to my first point, the melodrama suited Ophuls because it allowed him to make films in Hollywood. The popularity of the genre film in general and of The Reckless Moment in particular combine to increase Ophuls's bankability. The formulaic features of the "lady in a jam" and "mother coping in husband's absence" give Ophuls the freedom to explore an interest in some of the complexities of patriarchal culture and the repression of female subjectivity that it demands. The family melodrama, more than the film noir, makes this possible, for the film functions overwhelmingly in an ironic register that the great melodramas favor. The Reckless Moment thoroughly and decisively undermines the very concept of the patriarchal family, and it demonstrates clearly that Ophuls's lifelong interests in "theater and women," as Barry Salt rather summarily describes them, were anything but shallow.

NOTES

¹ Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983), p. 371.

² Salt, p. 378.

³ Salt, p. 371.

⁴ Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 172.

⁵ Cf. Nick Browne, "Griffith's Family Discourse: Griffith and Freud," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Winter, 1981): 67-80.

⁶ Wood, p. 172.

⁷ Andrew Britton, "The Family in The Reckless Moment," Framework 4 (Summer 1976): 17-24.

⁸ Bee's own difficulties derive from the loss of the "maternal function" in the Harper household. Using psychoanalysis as an instrument of reading, one could with interesting results shift the emphasis of The Reckless Moment's Oedipal dynamic to this question of the meanings of motherhood and the problems created by the patriarchal system for every daughter, upon whom pressure is exerted to forget her original female identification.

⁹ Noël Carroll, "The Moral Ecology of Melodrama: The Family Plot and Magnificent Obsession" Melodrama, ed. Daniel Gerould (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), p. 199.

¹⁰ Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 5.