Caught
Screening on Film
Directed by Max Ophüls.
With Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, James Mason.
US, 1949, 35mm, black & white, 1949 min.
With Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, James Mason.
US, 1949, 35mm, black & white, 1949 min.
British actor James Mason made his Hollywood debut in this film, playing a nice doctor drawn into the nightmare world of model Leonora (Bel Geddes), whose psychotic millionaire husband (Ryan in a portrayal patterned on Howard Hughes) keeps her a virtual prisoner in his gothic mansion. One of four films which the great German director Max Ophüls made in America, Caught examines the dark side of postwar American ambitions and domesticity. Ophüls’s moving camera and cinematographer Lee Garmes’s expressive lighting and unusual angles intensify the noirish melodrama’s quietly menacing atmosphere.
