Father’s not home for Christmas in The Reckless Moment (1949), a film with high spiritual stakes disguised as a simple domestic noir. The head of the household is absent from a plot that usually demands him, with the mother left to navigate an increasingly fraught situation involving manslaughter and blackmail. The story can credibly be described as suburban noir, housewife noir, or, as I would like to submit, Christmas noir. Max Ophüls (billed here as “Opuls” to avoid confusing an English-speaking audience with an umlaut) is primarily known for European films, but The Reckless Moment, from his short Hollywood stint, is worthy of yuletide rediscovery.
The classic era of film noir, the 1940s and 1950s, is a great reservoir of sin. We sometimes forget that all of the Biblical traumas and warnings can be found in this genre, under the cover of coats and hats. The usual cast of characters who have fallen into this reservoir are detectives, femme fatales, and criminals. The innocent, or at least comparatively innocent, are typically on the margins of the most archetypal of these vice-strangled melodramas. When a housewife takes on the role we would expect to be taken by a man, what is the film saying about a woman’s role in such a world?
It’s tempting to view this focal shift from masculine to feminine as a deconstruction of the machismo often found in the noir genre. Indeed, many critics have considered director Max Ophüls’ body of work, most of which are considered ‘women’s pictures,’ through a feminist or feminine lens. Selecting just three of his films shows us women unsafe in every social strata: in high society (The Earrings of Madame de…), in the middle class (The Reckless Moment), and in the working class (Caught). There may be something to this feminist interpretation, but matters are complicated when we consider how the absence of the father in The Reckless Moment is the thing that brings danger.
The film reinforces certain brute facts about the business of men and how a more ordered structure keeps ordinary women either away from, or on the periphery of, such a dangerous world. What some might call ‘The Divine Order of the Household’ is disrupted by the father’s absence. What scholar Stefania Ciocia calls the “soft-boiled housewife” is now in the position where the hard-boiled detective might be. The family is incomplete while the paterfamilias is away for work, and although he frequently calls home, we never see him or hear him, and his presence is sorely missed.
It is heavily implied, and later openly admitted by Mrs. Harper, that the return of the father would likely solve the problems that neither she, her young son, nor the grandfather can fix. In a letter she decides against sending him, she writes, “If only David were older–or Father younger–but there’s no one–I have to handle it alone. If you were here, you’d get rid of that beast.” The fact that the film is set in the week leading up to Christmas, with Christmas trees, gifts, and festive cheer being very much a part of the texture of the story, is more than superficial irony.
In the movies, Christmas can mean wisdom or window dressing. But at its most spiritually significant, Christmas is the promise of the incarnate God entering the world, a living sign that we are not abandoned. The symbolic doubling of the absent father with the absent Father gives the film a rich and troubling subtext. In Christian theology, the concept of a hidden God (Deus absconditus) is the painful possibility of a Shepherd being unknowable, or just out of reach enough, to His flock. Perhaps, as Pascal suggests in the Pensées, God remains “hidden from those who single-mindedly avoid Him”? For Pascal, if something is hiding, it’s proof that it’s there.
It occurred to me that perhaps the father is absent because Mrs. Harper does not request, or pray, for his return. Presumably, if Mrs. Harper were to inform him of the situation, Mr. Harper would return. She is, understandably, too worried to do this. But it’s hard to see this as anything other than a form of pride. In fact, Mrs. Harper is incredibly lucky to make it through the situation at all. Her only saving grace arrives in the form of an initially threatening crook, played by James Mason, who sees the opportunity for redemption by adopting a role hitherto denied him: that of a substitute husband.
When I think about Mrs. Harper’s longing for her husband’s return, I am reminded of Norman Rockwell’s Christmas art. There is a naïve sincerity to Rockwell’s scenes of happy, smiling families surrounded by bright Christmas iconography–a feeling that is sharply felt by its absence in the film. The father in Rockwell’s paintings is with his family holding gifts (“Merry Christmas, Grandma!”, 1951), or on his way back home as the children peer out the window in anticipation (“Oh boy! It’s Pop with a new Plymouth!”, 1951). People these days would like to think they are above such cotton candy sincerity, but maybe the audience of the classic era of film noir knew something we’ve forgotten.
