The Reckless Moment 

1949. USA. Directed by Max Ophuls. Screenplay by Henry Garson, Robert Soderberg, based on the story “The Blank Wall.” Produced by Walter Wanger for Columbia Pictures, Ophuls’s last American film stars a never-better Joan Bennett as an upper-middle-class housewife who believes that her daughter has committed a murder and anxiously conceals the body. James Mason is the small-time blackmailer who seeks to exploit the situation, only to fall for her. Burnett Guffey’s creeping crane shots and chiaroscuro lighting are perfectly keyed to Ophuls’s brilliant, amoral critique of bourgeois family life and class ambition. 82 min.