Moonrise

Confounding all expectations, Frank Borzage's1948 Moonrise is an intricate sentimental melodrama.  Borzage was a major director during the silent era and made a number of estimable films during the decade before World War II as well.  (His anti-Nazi picture, 1940's This Mortal Storm is a powerful and understated narrative about living under tyranny.)  Borzage is not well-known today, perhaps, because his hyper-romantic sensibility fell out of style in the era of  hard-boiled dames and criminals featured in American film noir.  Indispensable commentary on the recent Criterion DVD of Moonrise notes that Borzage hated crime films and, in fact, refused to make movies in that genre during the Thirties.  As far as I can determine from the few films by this auteur that I have seen, Borzage was a first-rate director specializing in movies in which the redemptive power of love is central to the narrative.  There is something precise, but, also, swoony about Borzage's movies -- the exorbitant emotions on display are controlled and, even, enclosed by his studio-bound esthetic:  everything is shot on a soundstage dressed with obviously unreal and theatrical sets. 

Moonrise is moody story about a young man whose life has been thwarted by the execution of his father by hanging -- the hero, Danny Hawkins, was an infant (or, perhaps, not even yet born) when his father was hanged for shooting a man to death.  Hawkins has been bullied and taunted about his father's execution all his life.  When a bully challenges him to fight at a backwater juke joint, Hawkins is beaten into a delirium in which he batters his enemy to death.  Fearing the fate that his father suffered, Danny hides the corpse.  But he doesn't go anywhere and, in fact, makes sexual advances on the dead man's girlfriend.  (There's an aspect of nightmare paralysis about the film, ancient trauma resurfacing to trap and wound.) Hawkins becomes increasingly paranoid as the kindly local sheriff begins to suspect him of the crime.  He retreats to a place called Blackwater Mansion -- this is a decaying ante-bellum plantation house guarded by a wise old Black man, Mose.  Hawkins plays with his girlfriend in the ruined mansion, a ghostly place still filled with furniture and portrait paintings.  Mose takes the young man hunting and his dogs tree a raccoon.  Hawkins knocks the terrified raccoon out of the tree and down to the voracious dogs -- the hunted look of terror that the raccoon shows before it dies is oddly similar to Hawkins' appearance:  he has ferret-like beady eyes that he won't focus on anyone else's eyes or face and is always gazing nervously away, on the look-out for adversaries hunting him.  In the end, the sheriff determines that Hawkins  has, in fact, killed the dead man whose corpse  has been discovered hidden in the bayou.  He searches for Hawkins and, in fact, sets Mose's dogs on the fugitive.  Hawkins plunges into the lethal-looking swamp.  But in the end, he surrenders to the sheriff who is convinced that the young man acted in self-defense to kill the dead bully.   The final shot shows Hawkins with his girlfriend, Gilly, formerly the bully's fiancée, walking beside the protagonist -- the screen is split neatly between wild, dark swamp land and cultivated terrain with prominently displayed sheaves of harvested grain:  the sheriff and Hawkins with the girl walk toward the civilized , neatly fenced and harvested fields. 

As in the last scene, Borzage devises this film as an exploration of a series of opposites:  there is the swamp, lurid with sloshing black water, and the cultivated land, the decaying plantation house and the neat little shack where Mose lives, also on the edge of a bayou filled with fallen logs and dark, disturbed water.  The Juke Joint is built on the verge of this same uncanny swamp and Hawkins kills the bully in the jungle-like forest.  Dialogue points out that Hawkins is a kind of mountain man, a country yokel; his naivety is contrasted with the hip-talking citified soda jerk at the pharmacy where some of the action occurs.  Primal contrasts are made between the dogs and the raccoon, the hunter and hunted, and, ultimately, the notion of fate versus self-determination.  The film's penultimate scene shows the hero engaged in dialogue with his mother (Ethel Barrymore) about destiny and the evil misfortune that has haunted his life, a misfortune that his mother doesn't perceive as necessarily fated -- she argues, as does Mose, that there's no such thing as "bad blood" -- that is, inherited evil -- you make your own fate.  "Blood is just red stuff that keeps you living," the sage Mose says, "as long as you're alive, there ain't no such thing as bad blood."  The DVD commentary notes that Borzage's Moonrise is an anti-film noir -- it has a seemingly happy, if muted ending:  justice will be done, the film implies, and Hawkins, with the help of Mose and the kindly sheriff and his loyal girlfriend, will be acquitted of the homicide on the basis of self-defense.  The web of fate can be overcome.

The film is handsomely shot on a shoestring budget -- it's a production of the B- picture studio, Republic.  The claustrophobic landscapes, all obviously studio sets, are expressionistic and support the film's ambience of flight and pursuit -- you can run, but not too far, and the swamp in which you hide seems to be about the size of swimming pool in a movie star's backyard.  There's a subplot about a knife involving a retarded boy named Billy -- the part is played by an incredibly young and engaging Harry Morgan, the guy who later was Sergeant Friday's sidekick on Dragnet and one of the surgeons on MASH for many years.  Inexplicable oddities occur:  Hawkins surrenders to a female dog, a bitch that we have seen with several puppies -- "Mr. Dog", Mose calls his coon  hounds.  There is also an extraordinary dialogue between the fatalistic coroner, played by Harry Carey, and the sheriff -- in effect, a debate about free-will versus determinism.  Several bravura sequences highlight the movie -- the opening scene showing men's legs and feet walking to a gallows, everything distorted by weird limpid and watery light is extraordinary as is a scene of a bully with a contorted face suddenly flying out of the darkness like some sort of avenging fury.  The infant, baby Danny Hawkins sleeps in a cradle with a hanged man dangling like a piñata over the crib -- it turns out to be just a suspended doll.  A scene on a Ferris wheel at a nasty little carnival is also memorable:  the hero and his girlfriend get on the Ferris wheel; the sheriff and his wife follow.  We see the sheriff sitting very casually with his wife, legs crossed and not menacing at all -- then, we see the same man from the hero's perspective and he seems like a terrifying avenging angel hanging over him from the scaffold of the ride.  The film very cleverly gives us a dual perception:  we see the sheriff as a terrifying figure (as he looks to Hawkins) and, also, as not frightening at all.

The DNA of this film is in Charles Laughton's later Night of the Hunter.  The elements that this film shares with Laughton's picture are obvious:  the hero (Hawkins and the children in Night of the Hunter) are stigmatized by the execution of their father.  There is a wild flight through a watery landscape in both movies as well as close-ups of wild animals, trembling in fear as the predator menaces them.  Both movies feature a formidable and aging movie star in the final reel -- Ethel Barrymore playing the role of Hawkins' mother and Lillian Gish singing hymns and sitting with a shot gun on her lap in Laughton's film.  Finally, the movies share a "look" -- both are shot in high contrast black and white featuring surreal bright reflections on black water sloshing around in studio sets:  an aura of nightmarish unreality suffuses both pictures.  (Nicholas Ray, also, saw this movie -- the scenes in which Hawkins plays with his girlfriend in the abandoned ante-bellum mansion will be reprised in the sequence with James Dean and Natalie Wood in the abandoned house in the Hollywood Hills in Rebel without a Cause.)