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A key American melodrama: draw a line between Citizen Kane and Written on the Wind, and you'll find Ophuls' noir classic at the heady mid-point. A car-hop Cinderella (Bel Geddes) chases a fashion-plate, charm-school dream; a childishly megalomaniac millionaire (Ryan) marries her to spite his analyst. Ophuls holds back his camera to frame the sour domestic nightmare, but gloriously equates motion with emotion when Bel Geddes takes solace with James Mason's virtuous doctor. The alluring web of hearts and dollars has rarely looked so deadly, and only the studio spared us the sight of the kill.

A melodrama and thriller with a very dark edge, director Max Ophuls' Caught (1949) centers on a lovely, romantic young woman Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) who wants nothing more than to fall in love. But her friends are more pragmatic, and encourage Eames to find a rich husband. Her first step toward that goal, on the advice of her roommate, is to enroll in the Dorothy Dale School of Charm where she learns how to entrap a man from the proper social station.

While practicing her newly-formed charm school skills as a department store model (look for Leave It to Beaver's Barbara Billingsley as a store customer interested in Eames' fur coat), Eames is approached by an effeminate toady, Franzi Kartos (Curt Bois) whose job it is to procure pretty girls for his very rich boss Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan). Kartos invites Eames to a party aboard Ohlrig's yacht, the beginning of a dark and tempestuous relationship. Eventually Eames and Ohlrig marry though it is more for Ohlrig to prove a point to his psychiatrist (Art Smith) than for love. Eames becomes an unhappy, unloved captive in Ohlrig's Long Island mansion until an ugly confrontation and Eames' decision to break away. She finds a job as a receptionist at a busy doctor's office in a working class Manhattan neighborhood where she falls in love with the principled, compassionate pediatrician Larry Quinada (James Mason) whose lack of materialism makes him everything Ohlrig is not. But Ohlrig isn't finished with Eames and he devises a plan to make sure she and Quinada will never be together.

Gary Tooze

June 25th, 2014