Moonrise (1948)

It is a performances centric movie

Best movie of this year hands down!

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I know there are those who hold this film to be a bona fide masterpiece. I wouldn't go that far. Many of its characterizations are hokey and it includes what might be the most troublingly nonchalant reference to sexual assault in all of cinema. Having said that, it is a memorable and unique picture. The opening scene is, admittedly, as aesthetically great as cinema gets. A luscious, mysterious credit sequence lays the groundwork for a series of dissolves between intricate shots, one more impressive than the other. It's not hyperbole to say that first scene is worthy of Wells or Tarkovsky. After that, the filmmaking comes down to earth, but there are other impressively shot scenes. The narrative is a strangely constructed anti-Noir that affirms humanity's difficult, perilous freedom. I wonder if Jean-Paul Sartre ever watched this movie. Bet he would have approved.

Dane Clark (Danny) is an outcast in the town where he has grown up. He's been constantly teased, bullied, beaten up and he still lives there! Now add the peculiar decision to make him quite a confrontational, aggressive individual and things make absolutely no sense as to why he has still stuck around in the town. The film doesn't ring true right from the outset. He's also a thoroughly unpleasant character and so it is impossible to get on his side, no matter how hard you try. Why on earth would local girl Gail Russell (Gilly) have any interest in him? No idea. But she falls in love with him when he forces himself upon her. What is this total nonsense! The film rolls along with impossibly false situations like this over and over again. Another example is when Dane pays a visit to the village simpleton Harry Morgan (Billy) who has found Dane's knife near the scene of a murder. The question to ask is where was the knife found. It's obvious. But Dane goes round and attacks the guy instead. Who wrote this rubbish? Yet another example is the ferris wheel ride where Dane's actions once again defy belief.You watch the film to find out what will happen so its ok on that front but there is some confused moralizing. The ending reminded me a bit of the Defiant Ones (1958) when Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier wait to be caught by the sheriff's dogs and go off back to jail with a smile on their faces. Only in that film, the message is more powerful and more emotional as you actually care for the two leads and the film succeeds in putting the viewer on their side whilst they are on the run. This offering just doesn't hit the mark.Allyn Joslyn makes a nice sheriff, Ethel Barrymore is rather ridiculously given 3rd billing for appearing briefly right at the end as Dane's grandmother. She does ok here but Dane plays the lead character completely wrong. In reality, he would have gone straight to the police at the beginning of the film given that it is such a small town.

Moonrise is an excellent offering from director Frank Borzage. The atmospheric story stays with the viewer long after the movie ends. So do the incredible performances.Ethel Barrymore only appears at the end of Moonrise with about six minutes of screen time. Nonetheless, she makes a grand impression. But the star is Dane Clark (on loan from Warner Brothers) who does a marvelous job as Barrymore's fugitive grandson. But wouldn't this story have been better told if it had been about a young black man (as opposed to a young white man) whose father had been lynched years earlier? For that matter, a remake could very easily apply the concept to migrant Mexican laborers who are often denied justice due to illegal status and community suspicion.

It opens with a prisoner being hanged, dissolves to footsteps through a night-time forest, to a baby crying in the shadow of a dangling toy, to a brawl in which a gang of kids smears mud on the face of an age-mate, to a brutal fist fight between two grown men, with each blow landing with a loud THWACK on the snot locker of the other, ending with somebody's head being bashed in repeatedly with a rock. Lloyd Bridges is on screen for about 50 seconds before he becomes a corpse. Ditto, Harry Carey Jr. The sequence ends with the mangling of a borrowed car and its occupants. Don't worry, though. There's no blood. We Americans don't like violence.Gail Russell is not only beautiful and sexy, with her mane of wavy black hair and pale eyes framed by dark lashes. She's girlishly breathless and vulnerable, in real life as well as on the screen. Her character here is candid without being insulting. She's tender, empathic, nurturant, devoted to the man she loves, filled with principle and virtue, flawless in fact, just like my ex wife.But, if you ask me, she has poor taste in men. First she's hooked up with the barbaric Bridges and then, when he's hors de combat, she falls for Dane Clark, a guy whose demeanor always suggests a pustule about to pop, on top of which he's not much of an actor. The romance between Russell and Clark just doesn't click. Warners had tried setting him up as a replacement for Humphrey Bogart. What a laugh. Clark was most at home in ensembles, as in "Destination Tokyo." Speaking of amusement, the only time Dane Clark smiles in the entire movie is when he picks up a puppy and snuggles it. That suggests that inside that terrifying exterior he's really cotton candy. The only friend he has is an avuncular old black man who lives in a dilapidated bungalow on the edge of the water.Well, the question that plagues Clark is that he's a murderer in a small Virginia tidewater town and the perceptive sheriff (a nicely measured performance by Allyn Joslin) comes to suspect him. Should he run away, now that he's a murderer like his old man? Or, since it was Bridges who threw the first stone, should Clark turn himself in and plead self defense? It was produced by the notorious bonehead and cheat, Herbert J. Yates, at Republic Pictures. That means low budget. The art director has done what he could to suggest a Southern swamp but it's all obviously studio bound. But Russell's photography is very good, and the director isn't afraid to take some chances. The silhouettes, the sometimes hallucinatory dissolves, the tendency of the camera to linger on the hands of a conversant, twisting a handkerchief, tend to give the images a dreamy quality.None of that is enough to lift the movie out of the doldrums, though. It's a routine melodrama with psychological overtones. The plot is pretty sloppy. What's the deal with the knife that Clark left at the scene of the crime (a public place) and that is found later by the deaf-mute and retarded Harry Morgan? Or Henry Morgan. He couldn't seem to make up his mind about his name. He should have simply called himself H. H. Morgan. At any rate, he has the most startling moment on the screen, when Clark begins to strangle him and Morgan, without resisting, raises his eyes to the roof and opens his mouth wide, like a fish's, in a silent howl.Best exchange in the movie. Sheriff: "All I know is that there's a lot more to a human being than what you cut up down at the morgue." Coroner: "Not when they're dead."