One of the little joys of Moontide is trying to work out which bits of it were directed by Fritz Lang. His name isn’t on the screen credits but he was the original director, until he was fired after falling out with its star, Jean Gabin. Ironically, it was Gabin who had campaigned to get Lang attached to the film in the first place, which shows he had quite a lot of pull in Hollywood for someone who might have been France’s biggest star but was unknown in America when he arrived there to escape the Nazis.
Archie Mayo gets the director credit but it’s surely Lang behind the camera for the opening scene – long tracking shots and economical use of camera introducing us to Gabin as if he were a star we’ve somehow not heard of. It’s the heroic entrance, the big man stumbling into a bar, kit bag over one shoulder, drunk and accompanied by a big barking dog, eyes flashing about the room looking for any available woman. Before this sequence is over he’ll have tried to steal a girl from a guy, then punched the objecting man to the floor, before offering to buy him a drink. This is lusty, lairy, big-hearted man’s man Bobo.
Lang and Gabin had fallen out over Marlene Dietrich. Which is appropriate, because the movie is actually all about a guy completely losing it to a woman. But first the dark thread that will run through the movie. In another bravura sequence that’s surely also Lang, Bobo goes on a bender – done in drunken montage – and wakes up the next day to find that a man is dead and he is wearing the dead man’s hat.
Strangely, this entire strand is semi-parked in favour of the love story, which follows hot on the heels of the realisation by Bobo that something bad might have gone down while he was paralytically drunk. In plotting that wastes no time at all, Bobo saves a woman called Anna from suicide by drowning. The two fall almost instantly madly in love and are both entirely transfigured (she no longer depressed, he no longer interested in other women). Meanwhile, bubbling away darkly, a mirror version of this love plot – the unrequited feelings of Tiny (Thomas Mitchell) for his buddy Bobo.
They’re odd bedfellows these three strands, with the Bobo and Anna story entirely dominating the other two. The Tiny plot and the dead man plot both resurface occasionally, but there’s something a bit half-hearted about them, as if someone hadn’t fully believed that the story of a man and a woman falling in love was enough but then hadn’t done enough work on an alternative.
Ida Lupino plays Anna and if you’ve ever wanted to see a display of sheer animal magnetism, here it is. Her performance is astonishing, leaping off the screen as she swings her big wet eyes towards Bobo and captures his heart.
Gabin is also brilliant, but then he was a remarkable actor, speaking clearly in a lightly accented English, and putting on a display of rugged masculinity that’s as convincing when Bobo is the womanising free spirit as the suddenly tamed guy desperate to marry this woman who has wandered into his life.
For a film that excited neither the critics nor audiences, the cinematography, by Charles G Clarke, was Oscar-nominated. This is strange but telling. Borrowing somewhat from France’s poetic realist style, Clarke gives us bright, clear monochrome images that now and again dip into the lyrical, the gauzy. It’s realism with the edges rounded off, and the obvious studio sets somehow only add to that sense of something semi-mystical going on.
Doomed idealised domesticity is often a theme in French poetic realist movies – see Le Jour Se Lève (which starred Gabin) and Le Dernier Tournant – and that’s what we get here. The more the massiveness of this transforming love story is emphasised the more the fact of the dead man – killed accidentally? – intrudes. Or is meant to. In fact the lack of threat is the film’s big problem.
Whether it’s enough of a threat for you or not, the ending shifts registers and there’s a face-off between the agent of justice and the agent of doom that’s almost mythic, with figures looming out of the dark and the mist and waves closing over disappearing bodies in a fight for salvation and survival. All highly satisfying.
There is an entirely brilliant movie in here somewhere and the sense of it not quite being up there on the screen makes this one of the great filmic what-ifs. What we have is gorgeous and fascinating. But what if Fritz Lang had kept his mitts on it? How good would it have been?
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
