The Reckless Moment, directed by German legend Max Ophüls, stirs up a rather original take on what is usually a very pedestrian setup. Balboa housewife Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) has little help conducting a house without her husband who is away in Berlin overseeing the building of a bridge. Her son, in a subtle insinuation of homosexuality, runs around without articles of clothing while her daughter Beatrice (Geraldine Brooks) has been seeing Darby (Shepperd Studwick), an older hood, while away at art school in Los Angeles. Lucia demands that Darby stop seeing her daughter; he demands a payment. When Beatrice learns that he is after money, she frantically hits him and he accidentally falls, impaling himself on an anchor.

Written by Robert Soderberg and Henry Garson, the film follows the lengths to which Lucia will go to protect her family. In a stunning sequence, Bennett wordlessly finds the body, loads it into a boat and dumps it on the other side of Balboa with only the seaside winds soundtracking the event. She pulls it together, as if it were just a sizable chore, and begins to go on with life until the body is found and a man arrives at her house. One might expect a hard-boiled detective but instead there stands Mr. Donnelly (an excellent James Mason), an Irish blackmailer working for top hood Nagel (Roy Roberts).

The Reckless Moment is not a towering vision on par with Ophüls' late-period string of masterpieces though it is an immensely entertaining, wonderfully crafted minor work by a great artist. It has a smoldering, repressed perversity to it that becomes more apparent as Mr. Donnelly begins to fall for Lucia. His feelings lead not only to a largely unrequited outpouring of romantic intentions but also a fatal row with Nagel, concluding in a car accident. Bennett locates and harnesses Lucia's manipulative side with an exacting effectiveness that makes the tearful call to her husband at the film's end oddly chilling.

Though beholden to genre, Ophüls' touch is apparent in much of the film's technical design, especially his work with the lighting and with cinematographer Burnett Guffey (In a Lonely Place). The magisterial flourish of Lola Montes and The Earrings of Madame de... can be seen in larval stage in many of these shots and there's an intriguing busyness to the scene where we are introduced to Mr. Donnelly with Lucia's son running through the space with what looks like no pants.

Over 50 years later, the film would be reworked with a gay-son angle in 2002's The Deep End with Tilda Swinton as one hell of a mother wolf and Goran Visnjic as a more subtle Donnelly. Though not a bad movie, it lacks the immediacy that Ophüls conjures in both Lucia's inability to pay and Mr. Donnelly's need to please her. There's no little amount of Freudian melodrama undercutting the crime element in Ophüls' film and it creates a rivetingly complex nest of emotions between Donnelly and Lucia. It might be doomed love, but there's a glint of a simple case of satiated boredom in Bennett's face, as if she could have simply dreamt it up.