For Wealth and Forgettance

There may be infinite ways you can look at any work of art but I see two principle ways you can look at 1949's Caught: either as a left-wing fantasy about the intrinsically superior virtue of the working class or as a restless battle between two vindictive, psychologically disturbed people. I find the latter interpretation more interesting but Lee Garmes' enchantingly dark cinematography and lead performances from Robert Ryan, Barbara Bel Geddes, and James Mason make this a dynamite noir either way.

I watched this movie on Wednesday night and it wasn't until about twenty minutes in I realised I'd seen it before. And here's my review from nine years ago. It's a playful review that doesn't probe too deeply in the film, focusing more on the opening scene where Barbara Bel Geddes washes her feet, but I might have made something more of the opening screenshot I used.

While she dreams about a life of wealth and comfort, Leonora (Bel Geddes) spreads her legs and swats flies between them. This seems a potent symbol of the methods she'll eventually use to marry into wealth, as much as she does have pangs of conscience about it. After being invited to a yacht party thanks to blind luck--catching the eye of a customer at a department store where she works--she's reluctant to go through with attending the party despite having spent time and money on a dress and makeover. Her very reluctance to go says volumes about her motives when she finally does.

She happens to run across the wealthy guy running the party, Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), before she even gets on the boat. She accepts a ride with him but balks at going into his house. There's an abrupt jump cut to Smith in his psychiatrist's office talking about how he'd broken up with Leonora after four dates. When the psychiatrist implies Smith doesn't know how to be intimate with people, he immediately calls Leonora and starts to take steps to marrying her, apparently out of sheer contrariness. Despite the fact that Leonora's internal conflict is supposedly the centrepiece of the film, we don't have a single scene of Smith's courtship of her or of the moment where she consents to marry him.

There's another jump cut, now to Leonora alone in Ohlrig's mansion with Franzi (Curt Bois), a servant of Ohlrig's who plays piano and makes catty jokes about how Ohlrig is a monster. Ohlrig does seem to be paranoid and becomes jealous enough when Leonora laughs at a colleague's joke that he orders both of them out of the room. But Ohlrig never physically abuses her. Nevertheless, Leonora is unhappy enough that when Ohlrig suggests she go away, she takes him up on the offer. She goes to work as a secretary for the saintly Dr. Quinada (James Mason), a paediatrician serving the poorest, working class citizens of New York.

When critics talk about a film noir like Detour, they talk about how the movie's narrative being through Tom Neal's point of view clouds the events depicted with suspicion, especially the people who just happen to die around him, from whose deaths he gains financially or otherwise. The number of unnatural jump cuts in Caught make me think director Max Ophuls has something similar in mind. At one point, Ohlrig comes to find Leonora in her new life. She tentatively agrees to go with him and then there's a jump cut to her waking up in bed in Ohlrig's house. There are no scenes to show any of Ohlrig's behaviour that result in her having sex with him or marrying him. We have no direct evidence that he coerced her, that she was genuinely attracted to him, or that she succumbed to his wishes due to a desire for his wealth. The absence of these key scenes, crucial for the film's nominal argument, raise my suspicions about our point of view character, Leonora. Are we seeing her edited memory?

To add fuel to this fire, we do know that Ohlrig suffers heart attacks when he doesn't get his way--in one case, Leonora admits wishing he would die. The film ends with an event truly remarkable for a film from 1949--Leonora and Quinada actually celebrating the fact that she miscarries the child she'd conceived with Ohlrig. Ohlrig had threatened to get sole custody of the child, something portrayed as a villainous act, and yet . . . Would the kid have really been better off with Leonora? And, hey, if we're talking about edited memories, can we be so sure it was a miscarriage?

Caught is available on The Criterion Channel until June 30.

Twitter Sonnet #1456

A figure turned and faced the empty board.
The figure changed as walls and curtains blurred.
The iron gate repelled the rusty sword.
Confounding truth was ever plain absurd.
Suspicious coats were carried back to Saks.
An easy heart destroyed the hardest man.
The money built a town in lofty stacks.
A house was built of wood and moistened sand.
The cooking sheet was rife with cookie crumbs.
We hid the bike to trick the passing boat.
A growing cake defeats the sickly sums.
A shrinking pie displays the number goat.
It's via steps the feet return to roost.
The dreamy brain confers to greed a boost.

Unveiling the Mind

A beautiful young woman stops speaking and attempts suicide and a team of handsome men try to put her back together again in 1945's The Seventh Veil. The sexualisation of a woman's psyche isn't even really subtext--the title refers to a statement by Herbert Lom's psychiatrist character who compares his therapeutic hypnosis, stripping away a patient's layers of psychological insulation, to Salome dancing the Seven Veils. The last veil, he suggests, is the one human beings almost never, ever allow to be removed. From this prologue, the viewer is compelled to watch the film with rapt attention so the sexual discourse becomes intriguing and nuanced.

Ann Todd plays Francesca Cunningham in every scene in the film, from age 14 to to 26. She's a talented actress but, at 28, convincingly portraying 14 is a lot to ask. Still, her first meeting with her new guardian, following the death of her parents, is plenty provoking.

James Mason stars as her "uncle" Nicholas--in fact her second cousin. He has a cat in his lap when she meets him--she tells him she's afraid of cats but he invites her to "stroke it." You don't need to be Freud to read into that.

But despite the obsessively grooming relationship Nicholas develops with Francesca as he teaches discipline to go along with her natural talent at the piano, mainly things remain chaste. Her first love is another musician, the rather uninspiring American Peter (Hugh McDermott). In fact, it's conspicuous how much better looking Nicholas is than any of the other men in the film with the possible exception of Herbert Lom. Lom and Mason attempting to penetrate her veil, as it were, takes the form of finding the root of her anxiety about her hands which inhibits her ability to play piano. This puts one in mind of Marnie but The Seventh Veil was more of a piece with two great movies from the 1940s about men moulding women as musical performers, Citizen Kane and The Red Shoes. The Seventh Veil never reaches such heights and is a comparatively traditional melodrama with roots in Jane Eyre and Pamela. Still, the tension between sexual chemistry and a master/pupil relationship is exciting and it's hard to say no to James Mason with a cat.

The Seventh Veil is available on The Criterion Channel.

Something Vague Must be Done

For getting straight to the point, one might commend the title of 1971's Kill--also known as Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!, which may or may not be a reference to Shakespeare's Coriolanus. This movie is about as far as you can get from Shakespeare, though. Bad editing and cheesy costumes render mincemeat of a screenplay that might have been a passable Hitchcockian thriller. The the bizarrely effective lead cast, James Mason, Jean Seberg, and Stephen Boyd, deserved a much better film.

Interpol is at its wits' end over the drug trade and after a few more twelve year-olds in New York die of heroin overdoses, five or six cops turn in their guns and badges in disgust. This is part of a rough hewn montage at the beginning, my favourite part of which is when a reporter asks a kid how long he's been doing heroin and he replies with only a nonchalant little shrug.

Enter Alan Hamilton, played by James Mason with . . . an accent of some kind. I'm not sure what he's trying to do, maybe American, maybe Hungarian, but he thankfully gives up at some point. An Interpol agent, he's assigned a quest to go to Pakistan and get to the bottom of the international drug trade. He especially needs to uncover the identity of a mysterious "Coordinator", a high ranking person in Interpol selling info to druglords.

Meanwhile, Alan's young wife, Emily (Jean Seberg), is bored with her quiet home life while Alan gets to have all the fun. She insists on coming with him to Pakistan and when he refuses she books a flight on her own and arrives before him. This leads to some of the film's most genuinely effective, if still kind of absurd, scenes. Emily rents a huge American car and gets lost trying to find her hotel, winding up on a dark road where she meets unhelpful Arab men. Then people start killing each other in the darkness and one dead man mysteriously winds up in her back seat.

Seberg's performance is so good, she seems so genuinely panicked that, in spite of everything, the sequence works. Even when the dead man is replaced for no apparent reason by a handsome Irishman called Brad Killian (Stephen Boyd), who calmly tells her to take the next left, I still felt invested in the scene.

If this had been a good movie, this might have been a great comeback role for Stephen Boyd. He interrogates Emily in a strange room with coloured light. A feeling of furious delirium is conveyed by the swinging camera and sweaty, out of focus close-ups. Eventually, Emily wakes up in a hotel room wearing a different outfit. She sees Brad killing people but they end up sleeping together for reasons that just kind of fall between the cracks of awkward editing. If the idea was that Brad's sexual magnetism is entirely responsible for her falling for him, Boyd actually almost makes that work.

The plot stays hazy and dips back into dull with Alan's story in which he's apparently involved in drugdealing himself, though he's not the Coordinator, whom he's still trying to catch. He's jealous that Emily is sleeping with Brad--he blames it on her need for excitement and she throws back at him, "I didn't want a different life. I wanted a different man!" Apparently she prefers the muscular, shirtless Irishman in the leather jacket to the older Englishman (?) in the grey suit.

The film ends with a quick succession of scenes that seem like they were improvised, make no sense, and rush over traumatic moments without the characters registering any emotion. Kill is available on Amazon Prime.