The Deep End

 

Writing/directing team Scott McGehee and David Siegel

Scott McGehee

David Siegel

Tilda Swinton on the set

THE DEEP END                    A-                                                                                                  USA  (101 mi)  2001  ‘Scope  d: Scott McGehee and David Siegel

Among the early film appearances of Tilda Swinton following her work with English artist and experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman in the 80’s and 90’s, starring in Sally Potter’s ORLANDO (1992), also Tim Roth’s The War Zone (1999) and David Mackenzie’s Young Adam (2002), but this is the film that put her on the map, a stylishly made atmospheric neo-noir murder mystery that is a remake of Max Ophüls’ last Hollywood film, The Reckless Moment (1949), which was about the hidden crime of slavery within a family, and by extension within society, with two major departures from the original, the transformation of the rebellious teenage daughter into a teenage gay son, while the subject of race is left out entirely by removing the character of the black maid.  This remake also lacks the sophisticated irony of Ophüls, a subversive trademark of his work.  Both films are adapted from American novelist and short story writer Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, first appearing as a story in The Ladies Homes Journal in 1947.  Holding is a suspense writer who excelled at the exploration of domestic unease, a favorite of both Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler, though this film reinterprets the blankness of “the blank wall” in a new way, as the female lead protagonist, a soccer mom, discovers her comfortable middle-class life is built on a lie, yet her awareness is tied to the terror of existence, a terror emanating from the metaphysical void lying beneath the surface in “the deep end” of ordinary life.  Film noir peaked in the 1940’s, with a focus on crime, corruption, and a cynical look at humanity, though they tend to be thrillers, crime dramas, or gangster films, emphasizing an imagery of shadows drawn from an earlier era of German Expressionist cinema.  Typically they tend to get more existential, often exploring a suffocating isolation of humanity and the claustrophobic nature of our limited existence.  McGehee and Siegel are a San Francisco writing/directing/producing team, kind of like the Coen brothers, or the Dardennes, probably the only partnership of longevity which isn’t romantic or fraternal, but neither attended film school, nonetheless McGehee has a PhD in Japanese cinema from Berkeley and Siegel is a trained architect, yet American postwar melodramas had an enormous impact upon them, updating a 40’s women’s melodrama into their own modernist noir style, where David is straight while Scott is openly gay.  That figures prominently in their rewrite, as historically gay characters in fiction and film are routinely killed off in short order, bringing a complex history of cinematic gay panic to the idea of having a closeted gay child, where the protective mothering goes into overdrive here, escalating to heroic proportions as Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton in one of her finest performances) bravely tries to protect her family at home while her husband is off commanding an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, forcing her to discover a new strength in herself, a sense of power she had not known before.  Emphatically resonating is the cinematic flourish from British cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who worked with Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie on Young Adam (2002), HALLAM FOE (2007), and Hell or High Water (2016), while the setting is magnificent, beautifully shot in Lake Tahoe, the same place as THE GODFATHER (1972, 1974), featuring wide expansive shots of the breathtaking vistas while Swinton has an extraordinary ability to also work in close-ups, where structures are revealed with complete clarity, concentrating on closed compositions, isolating the protagonists in closely-confined spaces, elegantly capturing an upscale residence along the lake, where the placid tranquility of the water is actually a mirage, as an overwhelming sense of dread lurks under the surface, something this film shares with Sean Penn’s The Pledge (2001) and Todd Fields’ In the Bedroom (2001).  In a subversion of noir, many of the most psychologically intense moments occur in the bright sunshine, and while Swinton is not your typical femme fatale, exhibiting a strong moral fiber as opposed to emotional damage, she is an otherwise decent character who is driven into the moral abyss of a seedy underworld, yet her femme fatale appearance in a bright red coat late in the film causes even her son to do a doubletake.     

Something of a psychological thriller where Margaret is forced to reckon with the idea of being a woman alone, she is stripped of her identity as a mother or housewife, suddenly confronted with a chilly existential emptiness when the walls of middle-class comfort come crashing down, as her bourgeois home comes under siege from a blackmailer, Alek Spera (Goran Višnjić), leaving her exposed and on her own, where her terrifying moments of isolation are the most chilling moments of the film.  Sexually repressed, half a globe away from her husband, and incapable of openly discussing the subject of homosexuality, yet just as driven to keep this from her husband, Margaret’s role as a woman and mother is put through the emotional wringer.  Two worlds collide, the natural blue water of the lake surrounded by green alpine forests, and the urban corruption and manufactured sins from the gambling city of Reno, where Margaret goes to confront Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), the unsavory owner of a gay nightclub known as The Deep End, where the décor is like being inside an aquarium, warning him to stay away from her teenage son Beau (Jonathan Tucker).  But when she finds Reese’s body along the beach outside her house the next morning, the gears of her brain start wondering how to deal with a corpse whose presence could destroy her family, as a rush of adrenaline from a sense of panic sets in, uncertain what role her son played in his death, but she assumes he had something to do with it, so she does everything she can to conceal the body and protect her son, where her cool composure under intense pressure is quite literally shocking.  Wrapping the body in a tarp, she drives her small dinghy across the lake to a peaceful cove and dumps it, surrounded only by water and empty sky, though by dumping the still visible body in shallow water, the film emphasizes the thin line that separates secrets from exposure, a key underlying theme.  Surprised to see his shiny blue Corvette parked outside afterwards, she’s forced to take a second trip across the lake and dive for the missing car keys still attached to his body, becoming more desperate and increasingly dangerous, finding herself alone in the middle of nowhere, before successfully driving the car back to Reno.  While all of this kicks into motion, she also has to look after her three kids, fixing them lunches and dinners, getting them to sports activities and ballet and music lessons (her daughter is a ballet dancer and car mechanic), while also looking after her elderly father-in-law, Jack (Peter Donat), without arousing suspicions, yet conversations are constantly interrupted or fail to materialize altogether.  Accustomed to emergencies, she feels frustrated by her inability to handle the volatile nature of her son, who is exploring his own identity issues, yet both skate around the subject, where both mother and son assume the other committed the murder.  Adding more fuel to the fire is an unexpected visit from a lurking blackmailer who produces one naughty X-rated video of her son that links him to the dead man, footage Reese secretly shot himself, which she’s cruelly forced to watch, something no mother should have to witness, leaving her with an overriding sense of helplessness.  For $50,000, he promises to make it go away, otherwise he will hand the tape over to police, implicating Beau in the murder, suggesting it’s merely a business proposition, as they were apparently blackmailing Reese before his unfortunate demise, so now they’re simply transferring his debt onto her. 

According to Roger Ebert in his review, The Deep End movie review & film summary (2001), “Tilda Swinton is the key.  She is always believable as this harassed, desperate, loving mother.  She projects a kind of absorption in her task; she juggles blackmail, murder, bank loans, picking up the kids after school—it’s as if the ordinary tasks keep her sane enough to deal with the dangers that surround her.”  In one scene we see Margaret swimming laps in a pool, hoping to escape the terrors of the present, reaching the pool’s edge gasping for breath, as if she is drowning, mirroring her excursion on the lake, where the physical and emotional demands are taking their toll, feeling overwhelmed and under constant assault, yet leaving no family trace of the exasperation she is experiencing.  Her desperate attempt to raise the requested money fails for a variety of reasons, none looming larger than the bank requires her husband’s signature for a withdrawal of that magnitude, and, of course, he’s completely inaccessible.  Beau is already in over his head, having just barely survived a drunk driving car wreck with Reese, which sent alarm bells flashing for his mother, and now she’s hiding a corpse.  He’s just a kid applying for musical scholarships at prestigious universities, where these adolescent decisions could adversely affect his entire life, and while she may want to respect his privacy, she’s forced to tiptoe around the parent-child boundary lines, never confronting him directly.  “He’s just a friend, that’s all,” Beau insists, not knowing she’s already seen damning evidence.  These roles reverse near the end of the film, with Margaret suggesting Spera is “a friend, just a friend,” though Beau suspects otherwise.  A life-altering event happens in between, as Jack suffers a heart attack on the floor of their home that brings him to the precipice of death, with Spera simultaneously arriving to collect the money she doesn’t have, only to see her sprawled on the floor administering mouth-to-mouth, screaming for help, with Spera applying CPR chest compressions that actually save his live.  Coincidentally, Višnjić also played a dashingly handsome emergency room doctor on the television show ER for ten years from 1999 to 2009.  Their relationship goes through a surprising transformation, having been brought into her life in such an intimate and personalized manner, creating underlying sexual tension, which is a fundamental contradiction for any blackmailer, and the irony is not lost on either of them.  Spera develops a heightened appreciation for the position he is putting her in, aware of her entrapment, drawing an explicit parallel with his own entrapment in criminality, where he’s a foot soldier in a larger criminal enterprise run by Carlie Nagle (Raymond J. Barry), who’s only interested in getting his money, using blunt force if necessary, convinced she is lying about not being able to raise the money.  This all comes to a head in the boathouse, exactly where Beau and Reese had their earlier tussle, exploding with the same kind of senseless violence that spins even further into the void of darkness, resulting in a horrific accident, with Beau witnessing his mother’s intense anguish, changing his perception of her forever.  This neo-noir thriller unearths moral implications of repressed sexuality and muted familial communication, yet the sexual theme creates an unusual bond between mother and son, bringing them closer together, while keeping it a secret from their absent father who would not understand, as Beau moves from teenage resentment to an adult capable of understanding her as a person, not simply as his mother.  This is a movie about secrets and their unintended consequences, creating elaborate ambiguities, contradictions, and misunderstandings, where the sudden violent death that drives the plot could not have happened and would not have had the same consequences without the specific dynamics of this family.  In the end we are left wondering whether those dynamics can ever be the same again.

The Reckless Moment

 

Director Max Ophüls

Joan Bennett (center) with her father and 3 daughters, 1918

THE RECKLESS MOMENT        A                                                                                         France  (82 mi)  1949  d: Max Ophüls

The highest reaches of the actor’s art begin, I believe, at the point where words cease to play a part.        —Max Ophüls

Among the more forgotten films in cinema history is this hidden gem, the last Hollywood film made by esteemed director Max Ophüls, perhaps his most underrated, which is not only his best American film, but also his shortest and most concise, consolidating the creativity of multiple artistic talents.  An actor, stage director, and producer in Germany and Austria from 1921 to 1930, he worked in more than 200 plays by the time he started his film career, yet spent his life dealing with adversity, including forced eviction from both countries as a Jew working in Nazi Germany, fleeing to Paris only to see the French government fall to the Nazi’s as well, taking his family to seek refuge in Switzerland where he was also expelled in a visa dispute with the Swiss government, eventually exiled to Hollywood in 1941, where the spelling of his last name is altered, as evidenced by this film.  Like other European auteurs at the time, such as Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang, he was treated poorly by the American film industry, unable to find work in America for six years until a recommendation from director Preston Sturges, who also undercut him on his initial working opportunities, taking his place when studio heads were perplexed by the Old World elegance of his sophisticated working style, with its scarcity of star close-ups, eventually leading him to RKO studio head Howard Hughes, making a series of four American films before returning to France, ending his career with a string of some of his most highly regarded films.  Known for his mastery of fluid camera movement, his visual style features distinctive camera movements, complex crane and dolly sweeps, and elegant tracking shots, having a pronounced effect on later directors like Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson.  In an early 1957 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Kubrick was quoted “Highest of all I would rate Max Ophüls, who for me possessed every possible quality.  He has an exceptional flair for sniffing out good subjects, and he got the most out of them.  He was also a marvelous director of actors… I particularly admired his fluid camera techniques.”  While his trademark motifs include the use of a complex and detailed dramatic scheme, lavish settings with an ornate décor of chandeliers, staircases, and mirrors, long takes that emphasize the subject, accomplished framing and lighting, and a strong female protagonist, he was one of the first truly international film directors, sensitive to national differences and the human qualities in all his characters, yet he was largely dismissed during his lifetime as a technically flashy auteur, where his thematic concerns were often regarded as trivial in the male-dominated cinematic universe.  However the artistic reputation of Ophüls underwent serious critical reevaluation in the early 1970’s with the advent of feminism, where his baroque style, attention to details, and intense focus on female characters were viewed as not only prophetic but thoroughly contemporary.  Like fellow German émigré Douglas Sirk, the sophisticated camera work and lush décor that were once derided as empty exercises in excess have since been regarded as painstakingly intertwined with the state of mind of the central characters, offering a unique reflection of the postwar landscape.  When examined from a historical lens, the spector of European trauma inhabits Ophüls’ American films, emphasizing the darker side of human nature, where it’s important to acknowledge that a transformation in postwar American culture was largely achieved by the arrival of European émigrés who brought with them haunting personal experiences and Freudian psychoanalytic methods while also introducing Brechtian modernism into America cinema, which can be seen in the melodramas of Sirk and Ophüls.

The story is adapted from The Blank Wall, a 1947 Ladies Home Journal story written by American novelist and short story writer Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, one of the many mystery writers who have undergone repeated cycles of neglect and rediscovery, turned into a what is generally considered her best novel, a subversive and original take on the figure of mother and housewife at odds with traditional views, reconfiguring a maternal protagonist in a patriarchal role, listed by The Guardian in 2011 as one of The 10 best Neglected literary classics - in pictures | Culture, while described by Jake Hinson as The Godmother of Noir: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, exuding a profound disillusionment with the condition of women in a field dominated by the tough guys of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain.  A pioneer of domestic noir and favorite of crime writer Raymond Chandler, who claimed she was “the top suspense writer of them all,” she began her writing career as a romance novelist, but switched to mysteries during the Depression, where the emphasis was on the perpetrators and the victims rather than on the heroic investigators, accentuating the dark interior lives of her characters, with early strains of German Expressionism, exacerbated by moodiness, despair, guilt, and paranoia, writing 25 novels between 1920 and 1953, with 18 dealing with criminal wrongdoing in one form or another.  As a woman in a distinctly masculine field, she’s less well known than her contemporaries and often overlooked by the reputation of best-selling murder mystery author Patricia Highsmith, a postwar Hitchcock favorite who frequented bars and entertained a mix of New York’s gay and literary worlds, while Holding was educated before WWI at distinguished finishing schools for young ladies and married a British diplomat, living for a while in Bermuda, so by the time the term film noir became widely recognized, she was already in her 60’s.  Celebrated cinematographer Burnett Guffey got his start working as a camera assistant with John Ford in silent features before developing an expertise for his use of lighting when shooting dozens of dark crime movies, becoming associated with film noir pictures, making 20 of them, most notably Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), while winning Academy Awards for Fred Zinneman’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  The other major collaborator is actress Joan Bennett (produced by Bennett’s husband Walter Wanger), who appeared in many black and white 40’s melodramas about strong women, with a hardboiled, noirish presence of this film.  Married in London at 16, a mother at 17, and divorced in Los Angeles at 18, she went to a women’s finishing school in Versailles and developed a European sensibility, collaborating with directors as eclectic as Fritz Lang, George Cukor, Jean Renoir, and Douglas Sirk, starting out as a sassy, baby-faced blonde in Raoul Walsh pictures before darkening her hair in the late 30’s and working with Lang in a string of four film noir classics, including THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944) and SCARLET STREET (1945), known for playing working girls, femmes fatales, wives, and mothers, she brings a dry wit, subtle intelligence, and a hint of mystery to all her performances.  In this picture she’s elegantly dressed by Jean Louis, who designed all of Rita Hayworth’s outfits, resembling a toned down and darkened version of Myrna Loy, the darling of THE THIN MAN (1934) and its five sequels, known for her wit and sophisticated charm, not to mention female guile, where it’s impossible not to notice Bennett’s chain-smoking, perfect lipstick, and wild, horn-rimmed glasses.

Even while working under tight studio-dictated time and budget constraints, this rare instance of Ophüls dealing with a contemporary setting is a blend of a women’s picture melodrama and film noir, set on Balboa Island just outside Los Angeles, a vacation spot with very few year-round residents, starring Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, a suburban housewife whose husband Tom is away on business in Europe helping to rebuild Berlin in the aftermath of the war, living with his elderly father (Henry O’Neill) and two teenaged children, Bea (Geraldine Brooks) and David (David Bair), along with black housekeeper Sybil (Frances Elizabeth Williams, a black activist who spent two years in Moscow studying with famed theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold).  In this film there’s an opening narration that quickly disappears, with suggestions of a literary work unfolding before our eyes.  Slipping away from her kids one day she drives to a sleazy hotel in Los Angeles to see a man named Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick) about staying away from her underage daughter.  Clearly driven by unsavory intentions, he’s a squalid character twice her age who turns into a shakedown artist, where she’s clearly out of her element, yet the sweeping movements of the camera with its meticulous eye for detail make this a compelling sequence fraught with tension, Reckless Moment, The -- (Movie Clip) She's Only A Child YouTube (3:27).  When she returns home, we discover Bea is a spoiled, rebellious type languishing away at art school, where her self-centered arrogance echoes the model set in the classic Michael Curtiz melodrama, Mildred Pierce (1945), the first film noir told from a female perspective.  The film takes a dark turn when Darby’s dead body is found lying on the beach the next morning, with Lucia immediately suspecting her daughter is involved, so she disposes of the body by dumping it in a distant lagoon, where protecting her family from scandal is her primary concern.  It’s a long, tense scene which is done in complete silence except the lapping of the waves, accentuating the breeze blowing her hair and scarf as she drives her motorboat with the body covered under a tarp, as she continually looks around, exploring her options, heightening the tension of her point of view with an impending sense of danger.  Very much a character-driven story, where shadows are evident in the hallways of the household, and objects are constantly seen in the foreground, like a labyrinth she has to navigate, yet things only get worse with the arrival of a strange man named Martin Donnelly, played by a moody and overly restrained James Mason with an Irish accent, a symbol of moral decay who went on to star in George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954) and Stanley Kubrick’s LOLITA (1962), who turns out to be a low-life blackmailer, wanting cash for a package of love letters written by Bea to Darby, implicating her in the murder, as otherwise he’ll turn them over to the police.  This really sets the gears in motion, elevating the intrigue in this brooding, psychological thriller, with Ophüls brilliantly staging this scene as a centerpiece showstopper, emphasizing the lack of privacy as the characters are under constant threat of being overheard, where constant interruptions challenge Lucia’s desire for middle class order and neatness, where nothing can appear out of place, making it seem like he’s a friend of the family, as he ingratiates himself into her life with strange and curious results, The Moves #3: The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949) on ... YouTube (6:58).  Desperately trying to hold her life together against a rising undercurrent of ever-increasing threats to stability, she goes into what filmmaker Todd Haynes describes as “maternal overdrive” to try to protect her domestic life, a place where everyone depends on her, continually bombarding her with requests, never having a moment of peace, as Lucia still must run her family, raise her children, and care for her elderly father-in-law without arousing suspicions, while at the same time negotiate with a shady blackmailer to avoid being implicated in a murder investigation.  Ruthless in her determination to prevail, the film dramatizes the crushing weight on the shoulders of women, trapped by family life, discouraged from pursuing careers and denied independent lives, faced with limitations men never have to experience, yet obligated to provide for those around them while also being a nurturing presence, where there is literally no escape from this indefatigable maternal role, a reference to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, becoming a radical critique of the pitfalls of domesticity and the patriarchal family, a daring move in the conservative era of 1950’s America.      

Donnelly, it turns out, is not your typical extortionist, as he deeply sympathizes with the plight of Lucia, who can’t raise the money without the signature of her husband, who is completely inaccessible, yet the monetary demand is immediate nonetheless.  Donnelly actually becomes infatuated as he hauls her groceries, offers grandfather tips on the horse races, and gives her son advice on how to fix an old engine, yet Lucia is casually dismissive, remaining guarded and emotionally impenetrable, stuck in this absurd no man’s land where nothing makes sense, literally torn from her world of suburban domesticity into a lurid criminal underworld where both feel morally bankrupt, while Donnelly finds himself in a similar position with his mobster crime boss Nagel (Roy Roberts) who impatiently demands the money now, with no further delays.  Lucia is seen in ever-restricted spaces, on the ferry with Donnelly, never leaving the confined space of the car where she is a helpless passenger discussing the terms of blackmail, in a crowded bus station, or in a public phone booth, always feeling exposed, afraid of being seen, where the compressed space is emblematic of her diminishing freedom, undergoing a series of “reckless moments” where the consequences become the primary focus of the film.  Exasperated at one point, with her family constantly watching her every move, Lucia confesses to her blackmailer, “You don’t know how a family can surround you sometimes.”  Viewing her as a victim, Donnelly aptly points out, “You have your family, I have my Nagel.”  What’s uniquely compelling is the way Donnelly fills the void by becoming a willing shadow husband, in some ways developing a deeper personal connection than she has with her family, so when he accompanies her on a trip to a local drugstore he blends in just like part of the family.  The postwar scenes of Lucia in downtown Los Angeles are particularly vivid, as she makes her rounds through the streets of Los Angeles visiting the bank, a loan office, and a pawnshop trying to raise the necessary funds with little success, where the traffic is terrifying, the sidewalks are cluttered, while strange men are lurking in the doorways, providing a disoriented feeling that matches her internal despair, resembling the documentary-style footage of postwar Tokyo in Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949), another noir film made about the same time.  Lucia Harper is not your typical femme fatale drawn into a fatalistic criminal underworld, yet she is drawn in nonetheless specifically because of the absence of her husband, forcing her to assume his patriarchal duties.  With women having no access to economic power, they find themselves in a subservient position in society.  What Lucia fails to realize is that Sybil should be a close friend and confidante, an ally in her unsettling adventure down a dark path and an omnipresent moral center, though conveniently out of focus, placed in the background, or left out of the frame altogether, yet Lucia rejects her repeated offers of help and sees her only as a black servant, unable to recognize her equally repressive predicament working for the Harper family, both reduced to servitude, though Sybil does assume the position behind the wheel of a car late in the film, which may be the first time a black woman drives a car in a Hollywood film, yet she remains uncredited.  Their common plight foreshadows the emergence of both the Civil Rights Movement and feminism.  Lucia’s strength lies in her responsibility as a mother, as a head of a household, and a respectable member of the community, which is a stark difference from other noir women in similar predicaments, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), or Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), who generate their power and strength from the way they manipulate men through their sexual allure.  There’s none of that here, yet we do get a very distinct cinematic image of her femininity in the way she neurotically chain-smokes cigarettes, or wears reading glasses to perform domestic activities, where she’s often seen behind a desk in a business-like manner writing letters or making a shopping list, where her restraint only makes the final scenes that much more rewarding, setting the stage for a dramatic emotional release.  Built into the film are bookended long-distance phone calls, with the camera fixed on Lucia as she takes the call by the stairs with family members parading back and forth behind her eager to get their chance to talk, calmly implying everything is in order even when it’s not, sparing her husband the dramatic details, instead conveying a picture of the same world he left behind, a portrait of domestic tranquility, while the “happy ending” of the finale has a subversive context, conveying the ultimate irony, and while she speaks cheerfully, she also weeps uncontrollably, a lingering expression of grief from the traumatic ordeal she has undergone.       

Note

Two years after the film was made, Bennett became the subject of her own scandal.  Having been represented by her agent Jennings Lang for twelve years, she met with him one afternoon to discuss an upcoming TV show, which upset her irate husband, producer Walter Wanger, who noticed her car was missing in the backlot of the television studio, having driven off in Lang’s car.  When they returned together, dropping her off to her car, Wanger, who was waiting, shot him twice where he stood, wounding him severely, but he survived.  Jealously believing Lang was trying to break up his marriage, Wanger pleaded temporary insanity and served a 4-month prison sentence, however the couple remained married.  Bennett’s career suffered afterwards, as the studios refused to work with her, having made 65 pictures in the 23 years beforehand, and only 5 in the decade that followed, with Bennett quoted as saying “I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.”

Maternal Overdrive  Todd Haynes on Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment on Vimeo (21:59) 

Eddie Muller introduces "The Reckless Moment"; Noir City 2016, SIFF Egyptian (7/27/2016) YouTube (7:19)

Moviedrome - The Reckless Moment (Mark Cousins)  Mark Cousins intro to the film, YouTube (3:00)

The Reckless Moment (1949) - Crime, Drama, Film Noir  entire film may be seen here on YouTube (1:22:02)