SOURCE: "Lucia Harper's Crime: Family Melodrama and Film Noir in The Reckless Moment," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1989, pp. 261-67.

In the following essay, Lang identifies elements of film noir and family melodrama used by Ophuls in his film The Reckless Moment.

In his book, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, Barry Salt concludes with a "Stylistic Analysis of the Films of Max Ophuls." In the half-page that he devotes to The Reckless Moment, Salt does not adequately explain why this film released in 1949 should have been Ophuls's most successful American production, but he does observe that Ophuls's films attracted some comment at the time they were made, because stylistically "Ophuls went that little bit further.¹ The Reckless Moment's commercial and critical success is explained vaguely in terms of "the extra complexities of attitudes and behavior of the principal characters," and it is described as an...