It surprises me that Max Ophüls has no place in the conversations on this site. Perhaps it makes sense: his films belong to an older grammar, too subtle for an age that prefers blunt statements. Ophüls speaks in mirrors, staircases, and gliding shots that drift like memory. His heroines are neither the box-ticking “strong women” of today nor the helpless dolls of yesterday; they are human, with all the contradictions and frailties that implies.
Like many German-born directors, Ophüls fled Nazi Germany and worked in Hollywood during the 1940s. Caught (1949), the penultimate of his American films, dismantles the Cinderella fantasy with quiet ferocity. Where Hollywood usually sold marriage as the jackpot, Ophüls treats it as a trap.
Leonora, played by Barbara Bel Geddes (later “Miss Ellie” in Dallas), is a model who has spent five years in Los Angeles without making it big. Bel Geddes brings a plainness unusual for noir heroines, a lack of glamour that makes Leonora’s struggles more believable. When she finally meets her “prince” - Robert Ryan’s reclusive tycoon, a thinly veiled Howard Hughes with sadism to match - she discovers that a palace can be a prison.
This is the anti–Pretty Woman. Garry Marshall’s 1990 confection ends with the fantasy intact: a rich man rescues a poor woman, and both smile at the credits. Ophüls, four decades earlier, had the audacity to show what happens after the balcony kiss: the suffocation, the gilded cage, the dawning awareness that money buys fur coats, not lasting happiness, devoid of cheap rhetoric and illustrated with concrete examples.
And in one of classic Hollywood’s boldest moves, Ophüls hints that freedom may come not from romance, but from loss. The film whispers what few dared then or dare now: that what society calls blessings can be the heaviest shackles.
Fairy tales promise happily ever after. Ophüls, with far more honesty, shows that the glass slipper pinches.
Available on Internet Archive.
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