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ChiaroScuro Review
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. -- PT, Time Out Film Guide 13
After arriving in America Ophüls worked on projects with Howard Hughes that never came to fruition. His frustration led to him referring to Hughes on occasion as “the oaf” and spawned the character of Smith Ohlrig – a thinly veiled portrait. Ryan, an extremely talented actor turns in a towering performance as the monstrous Ohltrig, a man who views people as acquisitions. While this is definatedly a career high for Bel Geddes, whose career was severely affected by the McCarthy witchhunts of the 50s is probably best known now as Dallas’ Miss Ellie. While she returned to the screen in the late 50s it was in supporting roles.
Of the many European emigres who helped shape American cinema, especially film noir, Max Ophuls brought one of the subtlest, most elusive sensibilities. Caught reflects this elusiveness: Part melodrama, part romance, part film noir, it's an unsettling film that burrows into complacent assumptions about freedom and success. -- Edinburgh Film Guild
John Berry was brought in as director when Ophüls fell ill. On July 30, Ophüls had recovered and returned on the set. Assistant Robert Aldrich recalled that Berry had not been told that he would direct the picture only during Ophüls' illness and that "he had been dealt with in a very shabby fashion". From Berry's work, only the "charming school" sequence survived in the final cut. -- celtoslavica.de
Max Ophuls' sudser about a woman who's terrorized by her wealthy husband is probably about as good a film as could be made from this '40s women's magazine-level script. Despite some interesting, subliminal suggestions about the American obsession with wealth and the way it shaped the way a certain stratum of women thought about themselves in the pre-feminist era, like many soap operas, it's basically an updated gothic romance about a woman who made a Bad Decision. Whether or not Robert Ryan's malevolent mogul was, as rumored, based on the character of Howard Hughes, his atrocious behavior toward his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) certainly is consistent with the eccentric recluse's notoriously cruel treatment of women. Once again, he's excellent here, more clearly a victim of inner demons than in many of his villainous roles, his relationship with his wife more clearly defined by the vast tracts of space Ophuls' expressive compositions put between them than by their overwrought dialogue. Bel Geddes seems a bit too healthily stolid to be playing the victim here, and James Mason's world-weary sophistication is a bad match with the admittedly lame part of the benign ghetto doctor. Given the constraints of Hollywood, it's not surprising that Ophuls would soon return to Europe to make the best films of his career. -- Michael Costello, AMG
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