the life of his terminally ill wife. It was released in December 1948, but the downbeat film, although receiving positive notices, was not a financial success. For The Reckless Moment (1949), directed by Max Ophuls, she was third-billed behind James Mason and Joan Bennett. Brooks, aged 24, was cast as Bennett's 17-year-old daughter, whose reckless affair with a seedy, older art dealer puts her mother on a collision course with a blackmailer with worse to come. The Columbia film was released in December 1949, a year after her previous screen appearance in An Act of Murder. Her final American film of the 1940s, Challenge to Lassie was made in Technicolor at MGM. Released two months earlier, in October, but not seen in New York until April 1950, the production gave her third billing, behind Edmund Gwenn and Donald Crisp who, in this version of the classic story, Greyfriars Bobby, were once again typecast as elderly Scotsmen. Playing the cemetery caretaker's daughter, she had the only female role of any importance, and was also given a couple of good dramatic scenes, but the focus was still firmly on the canine star. Her later film appearances were few but included roles in Johnny Tiger (1966) starring Robert Taylor, and Mr. Ricco (1975), opposite Dean Martin. Foreign films In mid-1949, with no immediate movie or stage prospects, Geraldine Brooks accepted an offer from Italian production and distribution companies, Itala Film and Artisti Associati, for roles in two projects to be filmed on location, co-starring top native-born romantic leading men, Rossano Brazzi and Vittorio Gassman. Similar in tone, both are doom-laden melodramas depicting the tragic price women paid for descending into prostitution in the midst of the hunger, deprivation, and moral corruption prevailing in postwar Italy. The first (released in the United States three years later as Streets of Sorrow) gave her, for the only time, top billing, as a prostitute making her living in the streets, who desperately and tragically attempts to prevent the handsome magistrate, played by Vittorio Gassman, who falls in love with her, from learning of her profession. Three years later, with the film finally receiving a shortened and censored U.S. release, A. H. Weiler noted in his November 1952 New York Times review that "Geraldine Brooks, an expatriate American who has emoted in more than one Italian film, gallantly tries to make a wistful and convincing heroine of Maria,