Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949)

Caught is probably the strangest of the Ophüls films I've seen so far. In my lexicon, that would typically equal "best," but I am really not sure how I feel about this film on the whole. Obviously it was released the same year as The Reckless Moment, and so it's interesting to see the two movies as a kind of diptych. For one thing, Caught instigates Ophüls' "trick" of concealing leading man James Mason until a good 30 minutes into the film, which he will repeat in Reckless Moment. Of course, unlike Reckless Moment, Caught has a second male lead, Robert Ryan, who is/was, as they say, "no small potatoes." 

But The Reckless Moment was odd in its chemistry between Mason and Joan Fontaine, since it emphasizes a stillness that was in stark contrast to Lucia's frenetic life. For the viewer, the dynamic looks stilted, but in context, stilted becomes appealing just because it represents a break in the pattern of others' insistent demands. Lucia is charged with managing the neuroses of others, but she cannot "manage" Martin, which makes him intriguing, and of course dangerous.

By contrast, Caught is a world filled with individuals who reflect varying degrees of sociopathy. As Ophüls subtly shows, this has a lot to do with capitalism and its dominant ideologies. Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes) is a lower-middle-class woman who wants to be something more than that. She wastes her hard-earned money on a six-week stint at Charm School (one of those old TV / movie tropes that I suppose actually existed in some form). She believes that her only chance at happiness, or at least escaping dingy poverty, is to marry well, because she and those around her believe that, as a woman, she has no other worth. 

Ophüls contrasts Leonora with her friend / roommate (Ruth Brady), who is more overt and Machiavellian in her understanding of gender and wealth. Leonora goes along with the idea that she has to marry up, but there is a hint of ambivalence about her. This is the fissure that will develop into a contrasting ideology, and that instigates the shift in her priorities. She wants to marry for love, to be in love, and to be loved. If Leonora is the moral center of Caught, it's essentially because she gradually exchanges one sexist fantasy (gold-digging) for another (romance).

Caught places Leonora, who is morally limited at best, in between two men who are both psychopaths. Ophüls differentiates them by making one more functional than the other, but the fact that Leonora has this as her slate of choices demonstrates the basic decay at the heart of Caught's universe. I was surprised to read that Caught is considered a noir by some. But this makes sense, inasmuch as the film posits a totalizing moral atmosphere that we can recognize as surrounding us, enveloping us, like a bad smell -- or like an ideology. This is only an intensified version of our own world, of course. Rapacious capitalism, and women as commodities instead of subjects: this is nothing new, but Ophüls, a bit like Sirk, cranks up the heat so we can actually feel the burn.

Smith Ohlrig (Ryan) is a millionaire involved in "import / export," that dodgiest of industrial pursuits. The fact that his name sounds like "oil rig" is perhaps coincidental, but it signifies wealth that is extracted, squeezed, pulled out of nothing. He purports to be a self-made man, but admits under stress that his father left him a tidy sum and he merely invested it well. (Any similarity to the Trump empire is purely intentional.) Smith is paranoid and violent, and his decision to marry Leonora is one of the most shocking things I've ever seen in classic Hollywood. He does it just to spite his analyst (Art Smith), and seems to resent Leonora just for being the person closest to hand when he acts on his tantrum.

In one of several attempts to leave Smith, Leonora takes a job as a receptionist at a doctors' office in a sketchy part of the city. One of the two doctors is Larry Quinada (Mason), a pediatrician who seems to hold his patients and their families in contempt, is in a constant state of fluster, and takes a degree of delight in dressing Leonora down regarding her shortcomings as an office manager. He of course discovers that he has feelings for her, and the fact that he shows her any kindness whatsoever makes him a desirable diamond in Leonora's eyes. We are to understand that beneath his insensitivity, Quinada actually cares too much, and the right woman will unlock that tender side.

Then again, it helps that Quinada is emotionally adjacent to a job in which Leonora is able to employ skills aside from smiling and posing. Ophüls ironically ties Leonora's effort to strike out on her own to an opposing domestic arrangement, and a man who can see her as someone with potential. An unexpected development sends her back to Smith, and she resigns herself to living under his tyranny until Quinada comes to confront Smith. This forces Leonora to make a conscious choice between romance and financial security.

There are a few things that have to be said about Caught, and particularly its high-pressure iteration of Ophüls's customary worldliness. There is a brutality to this film that is truly shocking, an inexorable cruelty that recalls films like Written on the Wind, or even Citizen Kane, but goes far beyond their bitterness into outright nihilism. [HERE'S A SPOILER] The casual manner in which Leonora's lost pregnancy is just waved away, as though the baby were a mere plot inconvenience, is truly astonishing. But it is all of a piece with Caught's tone of pervasive psychosis. This is practically Ophüls channeling Sam Fuller.

But then, as you can see from the stills above, Ophüls articulates space and texture with an elegance that is, to say the least, at odds with the film's moral decay. The grandeur and opulence of Smith's mansion manifest as emotional canyons, a realm of fussy details dispersed across vast distance. Quinada's world, with its hectic pace and cramped, declassé interiors, may be equally unappealing. But in the end, it seems Leonora would rather be smothered than exiled.