Caught (1949 film)

Caught is a 1949 American film noir directed by Max Ophls, and starring James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Ryan. Caught was based on a novel by Libbie Block. Child actor Jimmy Hawkins had a small role in the film.

During a onenight reconciliation with Ohlrig, she becomes pregnant. Ohlrig seeks to use the child as leverage to force Leonora to return to himpurely to assert his own power, and not out of any love for her. When he has an attack of angina the film implies this is psychosomatic, Leonora refuses to help him swallow his medication. Thinking shes caused his death he actually recovers, she calls Quinada for help and prematurely enters labor. Quinada rushes her to the hospital, but the baby is stillborn. With the baby lost, however, Ohlrig no longer has any leverage over Leonora, and she is now free to divorce him and marry Quinada.Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 100 of six surveyed critics gave the film a positive review the average rating is 8.410. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a very lowgrade dimestore romance, expensively rendered on film. Variety wrote although the performances are topnotch, the story fails to lift it above romantic pulp fiction. In more modern reviews, J. Hoberman of The New York Times wrote, The filmmaking is brilliant in part because, like Bel Geddess deceptively modest performance, it is so apparently unassuming. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker called it a masterwork and wrote that Ohlrig is a barely concealed portrait of Howard Hughes. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club called it Ophls best nonperiod film. Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine wrote that it is not as good as Ophls later masterpieces, but it offers a damning portrait of middleclass American society as a large and merciless snare. ........

Source: Wikipedia