Movie Love in the 50s introduced by James Harvey, featuring THE RECKLESS MOMENT Feb 13, 2002 the reckless moment

James Harvey’s Movie Love in the Fifties is a gorgeously written and engrossing account of one movie fan’s coming of age during the golden decade of the 1950s. Movie love, real movie love, not the AFI/American Movie Classics kind, is a genuine passion, as well as a form of rebellion against conformity and standardized thinking. By charting his own experience, and his love for Sirk’s, Ray’s and Hitchcock’s blondes, Harvey gives voice to the experience of many of us who have unashamedly spent so much of our lives sitting in the dark, looking at the light flickering on the screen. Join us as we celebrate the publication of Harvey’s book. Harvey will be here to introduce a movie actually made in the 40s (and recently remade as The Deep End), Max Ophüls’ stunning THE RECKLESS MOMENT, in a new, restored 35mm print. THE RECKLESS MOMENT (1949; 82 minutes) Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) valiantly tries to help her daughter (Geraldine Brooks) get out of a blackmailing scheme perpetrated by her slimy boyfriend (Sheppard Strudwick), before things go from very bad to absolute worst. Suddenly, a dark angel arrives in the person of James Mason's Martin Donnelly, one of the moodiest and most perfectly controlled performances of this magnificent actor's career. One of the many excellent films produced by Bennett's husband Walter Wanger, THE RECKLESS MOMENT began life as a Jean Renoir project, and its story has some of the feel of his late-30s work. In what may be his most underrated film, Ophuls concentrated on the sad, oddly romantic interaction between Mason and Bennett, and offered just as controlled and moving a vision of suppressed emotion as distinguished his European work, with a pitch-perfect rendering of southern California in the bargain. Wed Feb 13: 8