Having worked pretty consistently for 30 years, director Frank Borzage more or less bowed out with Moonrise in 1948. Ten years later he’d return with a couple of afterthoughts, but in the main this was it, his last picture.
He’d been one of the big players of the silent era – when the Oscars were invented in 1927 he won the very first one for Best Director – and this goodbye is in a sense a farewell to all that. It’s also partly intended as a bookend to Sunrise, directed by fellow 1920s Fox director FW Murnau, a lament to a certain style of visual lyricism that disappeared with the dawn of the talkie.
Sad to report, it is also punishingly sanctimonious, an “issue” movie that gets its wares out on the table early on and then hawks them relentlessly through the rest of the film almost to the exclusion of all else.
Except aesthetics. This is a beautiful film, even when it probably shouldn’t be. Take the opening shot – in shadowplay we see a man ascending a scaffold and being hanged. Again in shadowplay we see the dead man’s son growing up and being bullied at school, on account of being a murderer’s boy.
The son grows up and becomes… what age is 36-year-old Dane Clark meant to be playing? I’m guessing about 17. As the film proper opens, at a dance, Danny Hawkins (Clark), having spent years being pitied when he’s not being bullied, is getting into a fight with local big-wheel’s son Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges, on screen for only seconds so make the most of it), who’s tormented him his entire life. This time the beef is over a girl and ends with Danny, more in self defence than not, killing Jerry with several blows of a rock to the head.
Did he do it on account of the “bad blood” coursing through his veins? Is this his murderer-father’s bequest? That is the issue the film contends with. The answer, today as in 1948 is that there’s no such thing as bad blood, surely? Or if there is, then there is and that’s the end of it. Either way, Moonrise gets chewing on all that while Danny gets into a relationship with Jerry’s gal, Gilly (Gail Russell), which all happens too-conveniently and too-abruptly, and then makes gooey eyes at her until the sheriff (Allyn Joslyn, a lovely performance here), humanely but doggedly tracks him down.
There are interludes with what Spike Lee would call a “magical negro” – Rex Ingram as a black guy called Mose who lives out near the swamp with his dogs, dispensing homespun wisdom when not displaying astonishing levels of perception (he spots early on that Danny is Jerry’s killer, on no evidence).
Ingram can at least act, which Russell cannot manage, nor is Clark entirely convincing as a teenager, though he gives it his all. But the wobbly performances, the implausible love subplot and the overworked psychology can all be forgiven, as can the entirely pointless arrival with ten minutes before down-curtain of a third-billed Ethel Barrymore as Danny’s kindly grandma, as long as the eye is held by Borzage’s series of tableaux of a highly picturesque sort. What a beautiful looking film this is, almost every moment of it exquisitely composed and gorgeously shot (the DP is Jack Russell, who’d later do Hitchcock’s Psycho, which looks nowhere near as good as this).
Borzage counterpoints the looks with moments that are nasty – that hanging, the bullying, a scene in which Danny shakes a raccoon out of a tree so a pack of dogs waiting below can tear it apart, another between Danny and the sheriff where they compete to kill a fly.
Look how beautiful even the ugly can be, seems to be Borzage’s intent, almost as if he were also passing judgement on Danny. Surely not. As Danny runs from the law and wrestles over whether to turn himself in, we’re meant to be wrestling with the central issue – is Danny bad to the bone or has he just been dealt a poor hand? When in fact the bigger question is: how much breast-beating and hand-wringing can a viewer take?
Moonrise – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2023
