Slideshow
Robert M. Young's
CAUGHT
Monday, May 12
8:10
Post-film conversation with novelist and screenwriter Edward Pomerantz.
U.S., 1996
Directed by Robert M. Young
Written by Edward Pomerantz
With Maria Conchita Alonso, Edward James Olmos, Arie Verveen
Approx. 100 min. 35mm.
“Edward James Olmos is Joe, a Jersey City tradesman with a bad heart and some unhinged dreams. Having abandoned college after Vietnam because his wife, Betty (Maria Conchita Alonso), got pregnant, he went into the fish business. His now-twentysomething son Danny (Steven Schub) is an obnoxious comic and “Star Search” reject. His wife is aloof. His life is a series of 4 a.m. alarms, fish slime, and bedtime. He wears his demi-tragedy like a blood apron. One day Nick (Arie Verveen), a homeless drifter, ducks into their Jersey City fish store and life changes. He’s immediately adopted by Betty, moves in with them and becomes the reluctant Joe’s apprentice, student, and “first mate.” Nick puts a spark back in their lives. And they save his… CAUGHT is about simple people who aren’t simple. Young and screenwriter-novelist Edward Pomerantz create complex characters who are neither heroes nor villains but not precisely victims either. The first and last images we see are of fish, swimming around and occasionally being snared in a net.” – John Anderson, Los Angeles Times
Reviews
“CAUGHT is the most carnal of recent movies, a film that reminds us how movies used to take sex seriously.”
– Roger Ebert
“Benefits from the same compassion, simplicity and respect for characters that Young brings to all his work.”
– Edward Guthmann, SF Gate
“A GRITTY MASTERPIECE...CAUGHT has one of those rare stories that seems entirely of the moment and timelessly mythic all at once...Embodies an excellence that is beyond calculation...One of the season's best.”
– Godfrey Cheshire, New York Press
“A TENSELY HYPNOTIC TALE of sexual obsession with breathless exotic results...”
– Rex Reed, New York Observer
“A MASTERLY FILM that keeps generating tension and psychological force, placing the seamy sexual desperation of film noir right alongside the rigorous proprieties of classical tragedy.”
– Margo Jefferson, The New York Times
“ELEGANT AND CONCISE...With its attention to character and careful exposition that keeps the story moving at a clip, CAUGHT has the intimate, fateful feel of all the best noir of the 1940's.”
– Richard Rayner, Harper's Bazaar
