

The Reckless Moment
1949-12-09 · 82 min · ★ 6.7
After discovering the dead body of her teenage daughter's lover, a housewife takes desperate measures to protect her family from scandal.
Trailers are previews, not full movies.
No authorized playback source configured. Use the legal watch options below.
Production details
- Directors
- Max Ophüls
- Production companies
- Walter Wanger Productions
- Countries
- United States of America
- Status
- Released
Top Cast
James MasonMartin Donnelly
Joan BennettLucia Harper
Geraldine BrooksBea Harper
Henry O'NeillTom Harper
Shepperd StrudwickTed Darby
Roy RobertsNagel
Jessie ArnoldOld Lady (uncredited)
Al BainMan (uncredited)
Pat BartonReceptionist (uncredited)
Gail BonneyWoman (uncredited)
Chet BrandenburgDepartment Store Customer (uncredited)
Peter BroccoPete the Bartender (uncredited)
Paul E. BurnsDesk Clerk (uncredited)
Kathryn CardMrs. Loring (uncredited)
Claire CarletonWoman (uncredited)Title information and images are supplied by TMDb. Explore our discovery guide for advice on comparing metadata and legal viewing options.
Where to watch
Availability provided by JustWatch via TMDb. Offers can change. Provider links are listed on TMDb; full playback requires a separately authorized source.
Seasons & episodes
Recommendations

A dark personal secret drives a young woman to use every man she encounters.

A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.

Truck driver Mike Lambert is a down-and-out mining engineer searching for a job. When his rig breaks down in a small town, he happens upon a venomous seductress. When her boyfriend robs a bank, they intend to frame Lambert.

Cleve Marshall, an assistant district attorney, falls for Thelma Jordon, a mysterious woman with a troubled past. When Thelma becomes a suspect in her aunt's murder, Cleve tries to clear her name.

A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.

A gang hold a family hostage in their own home. The leader of the escaped cons is bothered by a recurring dream that the doctor of the house may be able to analyze.

A bedridden and gravely ill man believes his wife and doctor are conspiring to kill him, and outlines his suspicions in a letter.

A woman fights to convince the police that she witnessed a murder while looking out her bedroom window.

After being framed for a policeman's murder, a criminal escapes prison and sets out for revenge.

A brash young lawyer takes a short-term, high-paying job as bodyguard for a slick business exec being threatened by a former partner, and quickly realizes he may be in over his head.

A calculating divorcée risks her chances at wealth and security with a man she doesn't love by getting involved with a hotheaded murderer.

Alec Graham is sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend Jennie, with whom he spent a weekend at the English country home of the parents of his friend Brian Stanford. Alec’s father, David Graham, a not-so-successful writer and alcoholic who has neglected his son in the past, flies in from Canada to visit his son on death row. David then goes on a quest to try and clear his son’s name while battling “the bottle.”

In sleepy Santa Rosa, restless young Charlie’s world brightens when her sophisticated Uncle Charlie arrives for a long visit. But as his behavior grows increasingly strange, she begins to suspect that her beloved uncle may be hiding a terrible secret—and that danger has quietly entered her home.

A college student tries to get rich quick by wooing two wealthy sisters.

A crooked politician finds himself being accused of murder by a gangster from whom he refused help during a re-election campaign.

After two British Secret Intelligence Service agents are murdered at the hands of a cryptic neo-Nazi group known as Phoenix, the suave agent Quiller is sent to Berlin to investigate.

In an isolated farmhouse, located in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by a mysterious wooden wall, Zac and Eva, two siblings gifted with extraordinary abilities, endure every day the wrath of their strict father while witnessing how a cruel sickness lurks their beloved mother.

A falsely convicted man's wife, Catherine, and an alcoholic composer and pianist, Martin, team up in an attempt to clear her husband of the murder of a blonde singer, who is Martin's wife.

P.C. George Dixon is a long-serving traditional copper who is due to retire shortly. He takes a new recruit under his aegis and introduces him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic ordinary hero but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of the 1950s.

An upper-crust family dinner is interrupted by a police inspector who brings news that a girl known to everyone present has died in suspicious circumstances. It seems that any or all of them could have had a hand in her death. But who is the mysterious Inspector and what can he want of them?
Similar titles

A tobacco planter on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean becomes engaged through correspondence to a French woman he does not know. The woman that arrives does not look like the picture he received, but he marries her anyway.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents' house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.

A corrupt cop gets in over his head when he tries to assassinate a beautiful Russian hit-woman.

Cleveland siblings rise with a rock band while coping with personal problems.

Three detectives in the corrupt and brutal L.A. police force of the 1950s use differing methods to uncover a conspiracy behind the shotgun slayings of the patrons at an all-night diner.

A film about a pair of sisters, whose parents are divorcing after their father leaves their mother for a younger woman, and who plot together to try to repair their fractured family.

Elisabeth and Gudrun are two Swedish divorcées, both over 40, who meet when Elisabeth parks her car on a loading zone and is ticketed by Gudrun. Despite this shaky start, a friendship grows between the two. Elizabeth, a gynecologist, is sexy and confident. She leads the shy Gudrun through the dangerous waters of single life. But as they cavort through the dance floors and bars of Stockholm's nightlife they are led to a deeper examination of the relationships with men.

Private eye Billy Cooper hopes to conclude his assignment by the end of the night, but he'll have to deal with unexpected consequences.

The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.

A New York nightclub manager tries to save his brother and father from Russian mafia hitmen.

Lorenzo Odone, a Virginia 5-year-old, develops a degenerative nerve disease so rare that nobody is working on a cure, so his parents decide to immerse themselves in research and tackle the problem themselves.

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own.

In 1980, the black Falashas in Ethiopia are recognised as genuine Jews and are secretly carried to Israel. The day before the transport the son of a Jewish mother dies. In his place and with his name (Schlomo) she takes a Christian 9-year-old boy.

A 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.

While doing a friend a favor and searching for a runaway teenager, a police detective stumbles upon a bizarre band of criminals about to pull off a bank robbery.

A Russian teenager living in London dies during childbirth but leaves clues in her diary that could tie her child to a rape involving a violent Russian mob family.

Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out—she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor against the new straight-arrow building commissioner, Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.

Two siblings begin to develop special talents after they find a mysterious box of toys, and soon their parents and even their teacher are drawn into a strange new world – and find a task ahead of them that is far more important than any of them could imagine.

Alexandre Boursault, a provincial notary, would have been the happiest man alive if his wife did not openly display her political views and participate in all kinds of demonstrations.