Caught Reviews

CAUGHT, one of four films which the great German director Max Ophuls made in America, is an incisive and compulsively entertaining "woman's picture" about an ambitious model who aspires to marry a millionaire, only to find herself trapped in a nightmare when her tycoon husband turns out to be a sadistic megalomaniac. Small-town girl Maude Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) moves to Los Angeles with the intention of marrying rich. She attends charm school and changes her name to Leonora, then gets a job modeling fur coats in a department store. She starts dating a multi-millionaire tycoon named Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) and agrees to marry him, unaware that he's seeing a psychiatrist (Art Smith) for emotional problems which result in recurring psychosomatic "heart attacks" and that he only proposed to her to spite his doctor. Leonora moves into Smith's luxurious home, but she becomes bored and lonely because of his frequent business trips. When he is home, he's cold and tyrannical towards Leonora and treats her like a paid employee. After moving to a mansion on Long Island, Leonora and Smith have a particularly nasty fight and she asks for a divorce, but he refuses to pay her a settlement. She leaves home and moves into a shabby apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, taking a job as receptionist to a doctor named Larry Quinada (James Mason), but Smith finds her and begs her to come back. She gives in, but then leaves him again when she finds out that he only wanted her to accompany him on a publicity tour. She goes back to work for Larry and they fall in love, but she never tells him that she's married. He proposes to her, but when she learns that she's pregnant with Smith's baby, she returns to his Long Island mansion purely for the sake of security for her unborn child. Larry tracks her down and confronts Smith, who reveals that he's Leonora's husband. Smith promises to give Leonora a divorce if she gives up her baby to him, and when she refuses, he vows to destroy her. She becomes a virtual prisoner in his house, but on the night that she goes into labor, Smith suffers a critical heart attack and Leonora's premature baby dies, leaving her free to be with Larry. CAUGHT was deemed to be "Max's best American film" by Jean-Luc Godard when he was a critic in 1958, and Pauline Kael agreed, calling it "The most interesting and emotionally complex of Ophuls's American pictures." Ophuls himself had a more modest opinion, saying in a Cahiers du Cinema interview that "The film goes off the rails towards the end, but up to the last 10 minutes, it wasn't bad." While Godard and Kael's minority opinion may be extreme in light of Ophuls's masterly American film LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948), CAUGHT is definitely a rich and highly accomplished film. It's also fairly unique in the American cinema for the critical way it examines the dark side of the American dream, the obsession with money and how it's equated with happiness, and the insidious ways that girls are indoctrinated to shape their minds and bodies to catch a rich spouse. The psychological ramifications of wealth at all costs are vividly dramatized in the scenes of the unbalanced Smith terrorizing Leonora. The depiction of verbal and mental cruelty was way ahead of its time, as is its sophisticated European attitude, in which everyone's character is flawed to some degree. Ophuls's trademark use of elaborate crane shots and a constantly moving camera is relatively restrained here, which is appropriate for the scenes where Leonora feels trapped in the claustrophobic house, but Lee Garmes's fluid camerawork and noirish low-key lighting create an ominous mood, and there are some marvelous tracking shots to signify Leonora's happiness when she's dancing with Larry. Robert Ryan gives a superbly creepy, understated performance as the pathological Smith, making him both loathsome and pitiable. Smith's character is said to be a thinly-veiled portrait of Howard Hughes (based on Ophuls's humiliating experience on the Hughes-produced VENDETTA, from which he was unceremoniously fired) which is reinforced by Ryan's longtime association with Hughes's RKO Studio. Indeed, Ophuls treats the entire story as a metaphor for prostituting oneself in Hollywood, with Smith's sycophantic German gofer Franzi (played by the wonderfully jaded Curt Bois), perhaps standing in for Ophuls himself, vis-a-vis his humiliating dealings with executives at the American studios. (Adult situations.)