The Reckless Moment
The Reckless Moment

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- 71/100 based on 5,393 votes

In the charming community of Balboa 50 miles from Los Angeles, middle-class housewife Lucia Harper travels to Los Angeles to meet scoundrel, Ted Darby. Her seventeen year-old daughter Beatrice is in love with Ted. He asks for money to leave Bea, but Lucia refuses to give any. Bea does not believe her mother when told and during the night she sneaks out to the boat garage to meet Ted who admits that Lucia told the truth. Bea pushes him and Ted falls to his on an anchor. The ne... (Full plot summary below)

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Actors in The Reckless Moment:

James Mason
Joan Bennett
Geraldine Brooks
Henry O'Neill
Shepperd Strudwick
David Bair

Full Plot Details

In the charming community of Balboa 50 miles from Los Angeles, middle-class housewife Lucia Harper travels to Los Angeles to meet scoundrel, Ted Darby. Her seventeen year-old daughter Beatrice is in love with Ted. He asks for money to leave Bea, but Lucia refuses to give any. Bea does not believe her mother when told and during the night she sneaks out to the boat garage to meet Ted who admits that Lucia told the truth. Bea pushes him and Ted falls to his on an anchor. The next morning, Lucia finds the body and assumes that Bea has killed her lover. She decides to get rid of the corpse and puts it in her boat and dumps it far from home. When the police find Ted, a stranger, Martin Donnelly, visits Lucia to blackmail her on behalf of his partner, Nagel who has several letters Bea had written to Ted. Donnelly wants $5000 for the letters. The desperate Lucia tries to raise the amount. Martin falls in love with Lucia and tries to help her too. The dangerous Nagel wants to receive the amount at any price.

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Movie Reviews

Parallax View - 7/10 by Sean AxmakerIt certainly makes for the purest and most impossible love of [Max] Ophuls' films, and for me, the most emotionally compelling.
User Review - 10/10 by Lynne SI wish my copy had that front cover! Its more subtle than simple genre labels allow, its a bit of everything and wonderful because of that. James Mason is amazing as always!
User Review - 10/10 by gary twow what a movie....i have just seen this movie 4 the 1st time n think that this is a good movie 2 watch...its got a good cast of actors/actressess throughout this movie....i think that james mason, joan bennett, geraldine brooks, henry o neill, sheppard strudwick, david blair, roy roberts play good parts/roles throughout this movie...its a good 1940's movie 2 watch...i think that the director of this classic/black n white/ noir/drama movie had done a good job of directing this movie because you never know what 2 expect throughout this movie its a great movie 2 watch
User Review - 10/10 by Tibor BMany seem to consider Max Ophuls a man with feminist sensibilities but I can't really see that in his other works even in The Earrings of Madame de or Lola Montes so I can say that The Reckless Moment is the closest Max Ophuls got to being feminist at all. A houswife whose husband is always away and never there to depend on deals with this problem on her own, trying her best to protect her daughter, and soon finds herself having some feelings for the one who blackmails her. It's Hollywood romanticized film noir at its best.
User Review - 10/10 by Jochen WYup Yup. Max Ophuls noir. Fantastic. This is some grade A filmmaking. The story is really tight. James Mason and Joan Bennett are both fantastic and the goddamn lighting is insane. Its just atmospheric and just beautiful. The crime aspect of the film is great but watching this mother go all out for the sake of her family is well done. Max Ophuls is the man.
User Review - 10/10 by Jonas ÅOne of Ophuls' best films. Really well directed and photographed. Bennett is very good. It gets better with every viewing.
User Review - 8/10 by Christopher Pi'm sure many of you saw "the deep end" with tilda swinton ... this is the original version of that film (though still adapted from a short story). the film plays as a great women's picture especially with joan bennett giving a fantastic performance. supporting cast do their jobs nicely and fittingly.
User Review - 8/10 by Roger P"The Reckless Moment" is a very entertaining and effective film noir with love story overtones. The story is set in post Second World War Los Angeles suburbia. Joan Bennett (in the kind of role in which I thought Joan Crawford had cornered the market) plays Lucia Harper, a fiercely independent middle-class housewife who is trying to keep things together (she has two teenage children and a father-in-law to look after) while her husband is absent, working in Europe. When her 17 year-old daughter Bea, played by Geraldine Brooks (who looks rather too old for the part), accidentally kills her older gigolo-type boyfriend, Lucia disposes of the body, only to find herself blackmailed about the incident by a sinister Irish crook, Donnelly (played by James Mason) and his partner in crime, Nagle (played by Roy Roberts). Things develop from there in what is a stylish, entertaining and imaginatively-directed film. Although its plot is of paramount importance, "The Reckless Moment" - which lasts only about 80 minutes or so - also manages to say something about such issues as middle-class values and security, feminism and motherhood. The leading actors - Joan Bennett and James Mason - are both excellent. A film that is well worth seeing. 8/10.
User Review - 8/10 by jay nTaut drama with the always underrated Joan Bennett great as the panicked mother and James Mason just right as the conflicted anti-hero. Wonderfully directed by Ophuls and atmospherically shot this was updated as The Deep End with Tilda Swinton also a fine film but this has a distinct allure of its own.
User Review - 8/10 by Jason RI don't think this material is perfectly suited for Ophuls, and I wonder how much the studio tried to match him with a story in the mold of his earlier work. That being said, Ophuls does a bang up job twisting this piece of pulp into something pretty wonderful. Bennett isn't exactly thrilling in the lead, but acting in an Ophuls film often just means watching the camera glide past you on its way to other destinations, in which case Bennett works as well as anyone. She has her moments, though, like the pivotal scene when she confesses to James Mason's Irish gangster that being a suburban mother is a lonely, suffocating existence. If Sam Mendes wanted to know how to get the American suburbs right, he should have spent more time watching this film. Ophuls understands in a way that Mendes clearly doesn't why the suburbs can be like a prison: on the one hand, Bennett's character loves her children fiercely and goes to great lengths to protect them; on the other hand, her entire life--down to the millisecond--is totally predicated on managing her family. Ophuls does an admirable job capturing this push-and-pull, and Bennett becomes a powerfully sympathetic figure as a result. Mason also does fine work, here, and the element of class resentment that gets explored through his character works, even though Mason isn't exactly very believable as a low rent hood. Oddly, Mason seems to have played average Joes quite a bit. Why did Hollywood take one of its most glamorous and handsome leading men and put him in a bunch of ho-hum parts? (In Ophuls's "Caught," for instance, he plays an East Side doctor whose practice borders on charity and winds up marrying Barbara Bel Geddes. Babs was a lovely woman, I'm sure, but she's no Grace Kelly.) The film is also compelling, of course, as an exercise in style. Ophuls gently nudges classical style, elongating takes and using sweeping tracks more than the average Hollywood film, and certainly more than the average noirish B-film. Despite the (mild) constraints of working within Hollywood's continuity system, this film is basically just as gorgeous as "Le plaisir," and the influence of the American crime film on the lighting brings a new dimension to Ophuls's aesthetic.

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