From
the vantage point of 2023, the domestic and professional situations depicted in
Mervyn Le Roy’s “Moment to Moment,” a romantic melodrama released on January
27, 1966, might as well be a portrait of an alien society.Kay Stanton (Jean Seberg) lives in a charming
rented villa in Cannes, France, thanks to her husband Neil’s sabbatical from
his tenured position as an eminent professor of psychology at Columbia
University.If you ask a professor
nowadays if he or she ever expects to receive a year’s paid leave on the French
Riviera complete with housing, the answer is likely to be, “Sure, in your
dreams.”In today’s penny-pinching,
increasingly conservative institutions of higher learning, most professors are
lucky to get tenure.
Kay
has no visible interests or pursuits outside of her role as a housewife, and
even the chores of cooking, cleaning, and supervising the couple’s well-behaved
ten-year-old son are fulfilled by paid help.Today’s overworked, stressed-out soccer moms would pant with envy, but
Kay is lonely.Neil (an archetypal
Arthur Hill role played here by . . . Arthur Hill!) is a loving husband, but he’s
on the road most of the time, happily accepting offers to lecture in London and
Edinburgh.In that pre-IT age, he and
Kay don’t even have the luxury of seeing each other on FaceTime.The best Kay can expect is a hurried call on
her landline as Neil rushes off to an appointment, and the most excitement she
can muster are the afternoon cocktails with her impish, divorced neighbor
Daphne (Honor Blackman).Daphne is as
happily promiscuous as Kay is strait-laced, offering a perpetual open house to
randy gangs of officers on leave from a nearby American Navy base.Despite her good-times facade, we eventually
learn that Daphne’s objective is as middle-class as they come, hoping
eventually to land Mr. Right in the form of a well-to-do, well-connected
commander or admiral.
For
Kay, temptation enters as she encounters Mark Dominic (Sean Garrison), a
handsome Naval ensign with ambitions as an artist.They meet when her son Timmy notices Mark
painting at an easel in town, and from there they drift into a relationship when
she offers to drive him around to scout out potential backdrops at quaint
village plazas and cafes.In the best
Soap Opera tradition of smart people who do stupid things against their better
judgment — not unlike real life, come to think of it — Kay goes to bed with
Mark one night when her son is sleeping over at a friend’s house and the
housekeeper is on vacation.Next
morning, Kay suffers remorse and tells Mark it’s over.Mark reacts angrily, a gun is brandished and
goes off, and he drops to the floor, apparently dead.Kay compounds one stupid act with another
when she convinces Daphne to help her dispose of the body.
At
that point, the movie finds its surest footing as a suspense thriller.Kay calls the police anonymously to tell them
where to find Mark, and soon the shrewd Inspector DeFargo (Grégoire Aslan) is
on the case.He suspects Kay of being
the culprit, and begins to tighten the screws by asking Neil, newly arrived
home not knowing about Kay’s infidelity, to help treat a young man with amnesia.The patient is Mark, alive but suffering a
total loss of memory beginning with the morning he met Kay.In scenes of sadistic comedy that nearly
rival Alfred Hitchcock’s best, DeFargo engineers a series of meetings with
Neil, Kay, and Mark in which various visual and acoustic clues threaten to jog
the young officer’s memory.Kay cringes,
Neil is oblivious, and DeFargo watches like a spider contemplating a fly in its
web.To say the least, it’s unorthodox
police procedure.At least he doesn’t
propose the old Hollywood remedy of smacking Mark on the head again to see if
that does the trick.Maybe he found it
more amusing to torment Kay.
“Moment
to Moment” was the final film of Melvyn Le Roy’s long and versatile career,
except for uncredited assistance on John Wayne’s “The Green Berets,” and it is
largely forgotten today even as new generations of movie buffs rediscover “Little
Caesar,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “The Bad Seed,” and “Gypsy.”In part, it was probably a matter of having a
B+ cast instead of an A cast.Jean
Seberg was a well-established actress, but not a proven box-office draw like
Audrey Hepburn or a rising luminary like Faye Dunaway.Sean Garrison co-starred in a short-lived TV
Western, “Dundee and the Culhane,” and then drifted into a busy but low-key
career as a supporting actor.He had the
misfortune of entering the business at the same time as dozens of other young,
good-looking hopefuls, and unlike James Brolin, Chad Everett, Harrison Ford,
Lee Majors, and Robert Redford, he never quite had the charisma or lucky break
needed to surface above the pack.
But
the main jinx for the movie was bad timing.Released the same year that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Blow-Up”
began to shake Hollywood’s taboos against explicit language and nudity, “Moment
to Moment” struck critics and probably most viewers as glossy, old-fashioned
entertainment not much racier than the TV Soap Operas of the era.Today, that very quality is likely to work in
its favor among viewers who weren’t even born in 1966.Who wouldn’t be curious about a world in
which a thirty-something woman lounges around the house in Yves Saint Laurent
dresses instead of yoga pants and a sweatshirt?The plot about marital infidelity and attempted murder is mirrored now
by true-crime podcasts and “NBC Dateline Two-Hour Events,” although the
culprits there are usually less attractive and a lot less classy than Kay
Stanton, and the cops less idiosyncratic than Inspector DeFargo.
A
new Blu-ray edition of “Moment to Moment” from Kino Lorber Studio Classics
presents the movie in a sharp, 1.85:1 image much richer than the old prints
that used to run on local TV stations in the 1980s, before “Dr. Phil” and “The
View” claimed their time-slot.Special
features include an amusing, informative audio commentary by Howard S. Berger
and Nathaniel Thompson, and a short 1966 featurette, “Moment to Moment with
Henry Mancini.”The featurette, actually
a slightly extended trailer, intercuts shots of the composer conducting his
lush score for the picture with quick scenes illustrating how the music
underlines Le Roy’s moods of romance and suspense.Would that we had more composers now as
talented as Henry Mancini, and more directors with Mervyn Le Roy’s versatility,
sharp sense of composition, and confident pace.