Ophuls’ taut noir melodrama provides a cautionary tale against love at first sight in the story of a young fashion model swept into a whirlwind romance with a capricious tycoon whose frightening megalomania only reveals itself after their marriage. Caught, perhaps more than any other of Ophuls' films, makes clear the ways that melodrama can engage the political as well as the domestic since power – like love and desire – relies on exchange. The wife's imprisonment on her husband's estate is one of the baldest examples of Ophuls' proto-feminist insistence on the extent to which heterosexual romance is based on the possession and exchange of women.