Some fine writing about Max Öphuls’ The Reckless Moment by Sovay: “There’s the heart of the story, Lucia and Martin and Lucia’s family. Their relationship is unlike anything I have seen in a film noir. Lucia is unlike anyone I have seen in a film noir. A conventional housewife blackmailed with the exposure of her daughter’s sexual entanglement in a murder case—though the blackmailer doesn’t know it, with her own complicity in its cover-up—we should expect her to react with helplessness, horror, denial. But we saw her in that first scene, coolly taking Darby’s measure by the openness of his contempt. She assesses and assimilates the reality of Martin Donnelly as briskly and unsentimentally as she has any of the other thankless responsibilities that structure her life[.]”