Caught

A young woman marries a millionaire but then falls in a love with a poor doctor. Bel Geddes is miscast as the woman in the love triangle. The role calls for someone beautiful and vibrant, but the actress is too plain and dull to be believable as someone who rich and powerful men would be fighting over. Mason is supposed to be American, but makes no attempt to suppress his British accent. Ryan gives the most interesting performance here, as the intimidating and controlling big shot Bel Geddes marries. It has the look of a film noir but it is really nothing more than a soap opera. Ophuls specialized in these types of films, but he can't overcome the mediocre script.

Barbara Bel Geddes is perfect as a starry-eyes young woman who wants to make something of herself. She goes to charm school. Who would ever dream that a young lady in such a cloistered setting would meet and be wooed by a fabulously wealthy eccentric!

"Caught" is cast in a unique manner. Maybe it was the director's lack of familiarity with American performers. More likely, these are the people who were most eager to work under him. Whatever the reason for his choosing Robert Ryan to play the millionaire, it was brilliant casting: Ryan was a superb actor. He was tall and intense. In his most famous noirs, he plays cops or military men. Yet the character he plays here is withdrawn, well-spoken, and even a bit effete. He's in analysis, to boot! It's an exceptionally good performance that today would win an actor all sorts of awards.

James Mason is also cast very much against type: He plays a doctor who treats poor people for little or no pay. (Light years, not just a bit more than a decade, away from his Humbert Humbert!) And Ryan has a manservant who plays piano and calls everyone, male or female, "darling!" He is played to perfection by Curt Bois.

"Letter from an Unknown Woman" is a lovely film and probably Ophuls' most famous American work. It'd dreamy, romantic, heartbreaking. "Caught" is very different -- I would place it squarely as film noir. However, it does not lack for his famous shots of people ascending staircases and doing other graceful things beautifully.

If only for Ryan's performance, "Caught" is a must. And there is far more to it than that one performance.

I wonder if Howard Hughes saw this devastating portrait based on himself. Actually, the movie's Smith Ohlrig (Ryan) makes Citizen Kane's portrait of newspaper tycoon Hearst look like a boy scout by comparison. In fact, the great Robert Ryan is downright scary in the part, towering over everyone else and just as mean.

Also indicted are capitalism's commercial values as evidenced in Leonora's (Bel Geddes) unthinking pursuit of a wealthy man and a mink coat, for which she gets a real education. Catch the excellent screenplay's first and last scenes to get the rounded message.

Bel Geddes is perfect as the impressionable girl with good instincts, caught up in a popular culture stressing wealth as life's great panacea. All in all, her journey amounts to a spiritual one, traversing noirish worlds from lavish wealth to extreme poverty, at the same time, uncovering a new set of values more associated with the world's great religions than with symbols of status.

Surprisingly, the movie's dark panorama is rather poetically rendered by director Ophuls' famously fluid camera. There are no sudden jerks or abrupt edits to jolt viewers recognition. Instead, it's Ohlrig's dastardly behavior that leaves no doubt. In fact, I think the movie's message would be stronger were his behavior softened somewhat.

There are a number of memorable scenes, especially where the servile Franzi (Bois) torments Leonora with bad piano playing. Also, catch that beautifully done scene where Hoffman (Ferguson) delicately queries his fellow doctor's (Mason) relationship with Leonora, knowing that she's pregnant. Note too, how often the characters second-guess the motives behind what others say. It's an especially thoughtful screenplay.

Too bad the film is not better known. Perhaps it's because the central character is a woman, unusual for noir. Then too, the 90-minutes sharply question America's great secular religion—commercialism. One thing for sure— the movie's not a Howard Hughes production.

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.

Department-store model Barbara Bel Geddes buys the notion that snagging a rich husband is the key to happiness. Once wed to disgustingly wealthy tycoon Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), however, she finds herself a bird in a gilded cage whose owner is increasingly jealous, abusive and frightening. (The rumors are that Ohlrig was modelled on Howard Hughes, much as Charles Foster Kane was on William Randolph Hearst.) Finally she leaves him to work in the office of a poor pediatrician (James Mason), with whom she falls in love. But she and Ryan keep drifting back together, in a love-hate relationship that grows ever more doomed and desperate (there's a virtuoso scene in Mason's offices, at night, centering on her ominously empty desk)....

This is certainly Bel Geddes' most complex and fleshed-out screen performance, but the script suggests dimensions that she only hints at; though the part wouldn't work with a tigress like that other Barbara, Stanwyck, taking on Ryan in an equal grudge-match, an actress with a mite more edge might have shown how the caged wife came to draw courage and defiance precisely from her position as a powerful man's wife. (Bel Geddes is just too wholesome and likeable to bring off this ambiguity.) And the heavy paw of the studio descends as Caught comes to a close: The conclusion is too quick, loose ends flap in the breeze, and satisfaction remains incomplete. Ryan's dynamo performance -- he could really make the flesh crawl -- and Ophul's elegant direction compensate for a half-baked denouement imposed by a craven studio, lest anybody take personal or political offense.

In 1947, in Los Angeles, an ambitious waitress from Denver dreams on marrying a millionaire. She joins the Dorothy Dale's School of Charm with financial difficulties and after the conclusion of the course, she changes her name to Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) and starts modeling in a fancy shop. She is invited by Franzi Kartos (Curt Bois), who is the assistant of the wealthy Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), to go to a party in the Ohlrig's yacht and she meets him in the harbor by chance. She refuses a one-night stand with Ohlrig and the powerful man decides to get married with her to have her. Sooner Leonora learns that money does not necessarily bring happiness and love and she unsuccessfully asks the divorce, but Ohlrig refuses. Leonora leaves Ohlrig and the luxury life in Long Island and finds a job of receptionist of the obstetrician Dr. Hoffman (Frank Ferguson) and the pediatrician Larry Quinada (James Mason) in the East Side. Leonora does not work well and she quits her job. Meanwhile Ohlrig visits her and tells that he misses her and Leonora returns to the mansion in Long Island. Sooner she finds that the invitation was just a notion of Ohlrig and she returns to the East Side. Dr. Quinada and she fall in love for each other, but Leonora finds that she is pregnant from Ohlrig. She feels divided between her love for Quinada and the security of her baby with Ohlrigand she needs to take a decision.

"Caught" is a melodramatic story about a woman whose dream is to get married with a wealthy man that finds that she has been bought by her husband to live as a decorative wife living like a prisoner in a golden cage. Robert Ryan performs another villain, as usual, and the cinematography in black and white and framing follow the usual standard of Max Ophüls. This film is wrongly classified as film-noir. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Coração Prisioneiro" ("Prisoner Heart")