CAUGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 549, 30 December 1949, Page 16

CAUGHT

(M.G.M.,-Enterprise) HIS, the first James Mason film to make its appearance since that interesting young man moved to Hollywood, seems likely to cause a modicum of alarm and despondency among his admirers. The petticoat claque, who love him for his dark eyes, his air of gentle melancholy, and the suggestion of the homme fatal which he manages to import into almost any part, are going to be burned up more than somewhat to learn that he doesn’t make his entry until the film is almost half over, and then only in what amounts to a supporting role. Those who have followed his career with a more critical interest will, I think, be equally distressed at the trashy mock-moral quality of the picture in which he makes his American debut, and at his relatively unimpressive showing alongside Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes. These two have, admittedly, been given more prominence in the story-and almost a monopoly in the film’s dramatic (or melodramatic) climaxes-but there was still enough left for Mason (a more finished as well as a more experienced player) to establish some sort of personal ascendency had he set his mind to it. He may have suffered in the editing of the film, or the desire to give. of his best may not have been strong enough to overcome a distaste for the meretriciousness of the theme; whatever the cause, he did not seem fully engaged. Even now I cannot call to mind a scene in which he gripped my attention fully (though I remember the pleased murmur which ran round the theatre at his first appearance), but I do recollect one or two explosive encounters between Ryan and Miss Bel Geddes and some smooth acting by a minor character (Curt Bois). I doubt, however, if there is anything about Caught which is likely to be remembered for long.

} The production is, in fact, altogether too conventional to impress itself deeply on the memory. In the camera work, for example, the continual reliance on foreshortened angles and steep perspective lines becomes far too obvious. The principal characters are always being caught by the camera at the far end of a barcounter, or across a billiard-table; or pin-pointed by the converging lines of a: grand staircase or a corridor, There are other and subtler means by which a player can be made to appear larger or smaller than life size but the studio has not troubled to explore them very far. Conventional is the word, too, for the story. Barbara Bel Geddes, who manages to give numerous indications of a genuine capacity for acting, plays the part of an innocent little mannequin who marries a millionaire and then discovers that Money Isn’t Everything. She also discovers that the millionaire (Ryan) has paranoid tendencies, and on top of that a heart condition which manifests itself whenever he is frustrated. But it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good d it is just those defects in her husand’s mental and physical condition which ultimately help to unravel the

whole tangled skein. For the wicked husband has a convenient seizure and dies (in circumstances which suggest that his wife was at least morally guilty of manslaughter) and she is left not only more than well provided for, one assumes, but free to marry the man she really loves-who is none other than that struggling young medico, James Mason. I might have managed a wry smile at this strange modification of the Money-Isn’t-Everything theme had the plot not also required the destruction of the woman’s unborn child as part of the prelude to happiness. That; I thought, was going too far.