"Caught" Review

 

by Daniel White

Director Max Opuls (and it is Opuls. That's how he's credited in his four Hollywood films. Not a mistake or a misspelling, but a deliberate alteration) has helmed a melodramatic masterpiece. Caught (1949) is sublime, intelligent and complex. Derided upon its initial release as a "low grade dime-store romance" and "unpleasant," the film is magnificent, authentic in its over-the-top theatricality, if you will. Based on a novel by Libbie Block, with a perceptive screenplay by writer Arthur Laurents, the movie is stellar. Certainly better than that other exercise in sudsy soap opera pyrotechnics that swept the Oscars the same year, A Letter to Three Wives.

The film benefits immensely from the three leads who make up the messy romantic triangle that is at the core of this picture. Hats off to Barbara Bel Geddes for her adult, nuanced performance as Leonora. Not a great beauty, but a great actor, Bel Geddes never had the cinematic career she deserved. Here she plays a young woman, eager to advance herself but struggling with a conflicted moral code. She marries the wealthy Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), feebly convincing herself it was for love and not his pile of loot. Unlike most flicks, where the heroine is pure of heart, our leading lady is not so simple. Kudos to Laurents for giving us a woman with mixed motives.

Robert Ryan is a testament to twisted, obsessive pathos as the cruel, demanding Ohlrig. A man incapable of love but able to inflict extreme torture, the black Irish Ryan has never been better. In real life a left-wing softy, no actor in Hollywood from its Golden Age could play an unstable sociopath better than he. Add a sympathetic James Mason as a brusque inner-city doctor, desperate to save his beloved from her mink-lined, pearl-studded cage and you have the brilliant Caught.

The film was produced by The Enterprise Studios, a company founded by John Garfield. Unfortunately, Caught would be its last endeavor, Garfield's Hollywood career soon to be derailed by the nefarious HUAC. With an ending in which a miscarriage saves the day (I kid you not!), outfits by the Orry Kelly, a campy turn by Curt Bois as Ryan's parasitical yes-man "poodle" ("I call everyone darling, darling" ), and distributed by MGM, Caught is currently available on YouTube.