Leonora's Place: The Spatial Logic of Caught

MARSHALL DEUTELBAUM Leonora's Place: The Spatial Logic of Caught Caught retains little more than character names from its source novel, Libbie Block's Wild Calendar. The novel's Maud Eames, never Leonora nor a charm school student, at the age of seventeen marries the wealthy, much older Smith Ohlrig at her mother's urging . The novel's Ohlrig treats Maud with love and generosity. The disparity of their ages, however, finally drives them apart. Even then, Ohlrig provides handsomely for her after their divorce and remains devoted to their son, who unlike their child in the film doesn't die. Maud makes a happier second marriage with Sonny Quinada, a hotel manager closer to her own age, not the doctor we know Quinada to be in the film. Not surprisingly, because of these differences, none of the film's cautionary lessons about wealth and class are present in the novel. Instead, as one might expect from its title, Wild Calendar develops a temporal motif that repeatedly suggests how out of phase Maud feels with her contemporaries. Even before marriage makes her feel that she has lost her youth, Maud feels out of synch with her friends and their experiences. As she reflects at one point while looking down at a group of high school classmates on a picnic: " 'These kids below, they're metronomes going tick-tock in time with time. But I'm always a halfbeat off, I can't catch up . . .'" (Block 69). Instead of this temporal metaphor, Caught programmatically employs its mise-en-scène to visualize Leonora's predicaments in spatial terms, at key dramatic moments coding the left side of the frame as the position of power. Caught develops this coding in several ways. One way occurs during the film's opening credits as Leonora and her roommate, Maxine, look Arizona Quarterly Volume 6o, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004?610 88 Marshall Deutelbaum at and discuss the advertisements in a magazine whose gutter graphically divides the frame into halves. In the shots that follow, the spatial design of the apartment the two women share is similarly divided into halves. Leonora's bed fills the shallower left foreground of the frame while Maxine is visible as a smaller figure in the depth of the frame's right half. This odd depiction of space in which the frame is divided in half recurs a number of times in the film. Sometimes the division is marked by an object that splits the frame, while at other times, as in the shot of the apartment, characters occupy either side of the frame, but at so great a distance from one another that a viewer cannot focus on both of them at the same time. The effect is quite unlike familiar 1940s Hollywood composition in depth that relates one character to another in continuous space. In Caught, mise-en-scène often makes it difficult to see both figures at the same time. The placement of one character in the foreground, close to the picture plane, and the other in the depth of the other half of the frame are difficult to see simultaneously even though both characters are sharply defined. The narrational use of the film frame's left/right coding first appears when Franzi approaches Leonora in the department store to invite her to a yachting party. The movement of the actors and the camera trace the shifting dominance of the characters as Franzi, on the left, proffers the invitation, and Leonora, moving past him to the left, rejects it. A considerably more intricate play of character movement in and out of the left side of the frame accompanies Leonora's first meeting with Smith Ohlrig. To begin with, Leonora occupies the left side of the frame as she waits on the dock for a boat to take her to the yacht. Hearing a boat's approach, she walks to the edge of the dock, the camera moving to place her on the left side of the frame. As Ohlrig appears, a cut changing the camera angle shifts Leonora to the right side of the frame as Ohlrig...