SOURCE: "Ophuls and Authorship: A Reading of The Reckless Moment," in Film Criticism, Vol. XI, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 21-7.

In the following essay, Morrison defends Ophuls's The Reckless Moment from critic Laura Mulvey's assertion that it depicts its female characters as passive.

Max Ophuls' last American film, The Reckless Moment (1949), deploys the smooth tracking-shots and dense mise-en-scène that are the hallmarks of his style. But far from setting comfortably into its studied pose as a conventionally opulent "woman's" picture, The Reckless Moment ultimately subverts both those conventions and its own surface opulence. The sedately subversive presentation of the female figure in the film suggests answers to the many questions hovering over Ophuls' work in particular and the Hollywood melodrama in general. Indeed, if one were to engage in the difficult task of rescuing mainstream Hollywood film from Laura Mulvey's wholesale condemnation of it ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative...