MOONTIDE (2oth Century-Fox 1942) Fox Home Video

Archie Mayo’s Moontide (1942) is a curious hybrid. It was supposed to make an American star out of French actor, Jean Gabin based on his already megawatt personality in French cinema, though a relative unknown elsewhere. On the one hand, it professes to be a noir thriller, but then veers into a sort of Euro-art house offshoot, more familiar territory for Gabin. Not so much, for costar, Ida Lupino who should have done more with this. The difficulty here is not so much that Gabin’s performance in Moontide is bad. On the contrary, he acquits himself of the role of Bobo (originally called Frenchy), a disreputable lady’s man/sailor who walks – or rather, saunters - through life without a care in the world. No, the biggest hurdle is Moontide’s generally awful screenplay from Nunnally Johnson and John O’Hara. Based on Willard Robinson’s sordid novel, this property was condemned outright by Hollywood’s self-governing board of censorship for its overt references to cannibalism, rape and prostitution. So, to discover these aspects of the story virtually expunged is no great surprise, although, it does leave Moontide utterly emasculated of its’ most potent and juicy content.

In hindsight, it’s fairly easy to see why Moontide did nothing to establish Gabin as Hollywood’s latest Euro-import, the actor’s continental charismatic never entirely translating into box office pay dirt on this side of the Atlantic. Gabin’s shortcomings, as far as American audiences were considered, were formidable; a face like a pug, and a wild shock of blonde curly hair, impossible for Central Casting to tame, wed to a stocky build – hardly, the matinee idol type. Also, his accent, to sincerely limit the kinds of role he could viably sell. Interesting, Zanuck should not have been unnerved by any of this; also, the novel’s salacious material. But Moontide makes an even more formidable casting error by hiring the irrepressible Thomas Mitchell for the role of Tiny, evil incarnate and working against type. Initially conceived with Fritz Lang in mind to direct, Lang is rumored to have walked off the set, due to lingering ‘issues’ regarding Marlene Dietrich – who, at varying intervals, had been the lover of each man. Worse, plans to shoot on location in San Pedro Bay had to be scrapped after the bombing of Pearl Harbor officially declared the West Coast a security zone. Attempting to refashion a fog-laden bay on the Fox backlot, the sets were instead confined to a sound stage with James Basevi and Richard Day’s art direction, complimented by Charles Clarke (an uncredited Lucien Ballard’s) moodily lit noir cinematography, lent a synthetic and distant air of mystery. Indeed, these spectacular production values – augmented by convincing fog and wave machines, to alternately create a grimy and menacing, or, scintillating and starry-eyed backdrop – earned Clarke an Oscar-nomination.

Given all the effort that went to will an art house-styled masterpiece from this otherwise turgid little melodrama, it remains a distinct pity Moontide did not have anything better to say. Indeed, Gabin was deeply unhappy working as a mere cog in Fox’s vast assembly line. The heavy-handed direction by Mayo, with its even more weighty focus on Gabin, resulted in a nebulous and vacillating story, further stifled by the manufactured décor. Artifice is one thing. But Moontide’s scenes play more like a series of incoherent tableau with narrowly more animation or propensity for storytelling than a display at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. The picture never draws from life, only Gabin’s emoting and disregard of it. The doomed affair du Coeur lacks finesse, and the chemistry between Gabin and Lupino is wholly absent. One suspects, Mayo and Gabin are aiming high, but nevertheless straining for an elegiac pragmatism, Gabin’s disenfranchised, and frequently inebriated sailor, Bobo unable to remain tethered to that provisional home life while operating his bait n’ tackle with Anna (Ida Lupino), a ragamuffin, temporarily derailed in her attempted suicide. The narrative becomes mired in the perpetual opacity of its constricting and death-obsessed realism, by the end, almost to become a perversion of it. Fate arrives a la Tiny, the crude blackmailer, offset by the benign and queerly incorporeal logician of life, Nutsy (Claude Rains). But again, it’s the O’Hara/Johnson screenplay, front-loaded with twisted derailments and a love scenario chronically to run afoul of these waterfront malefactors, that continues to deprive the movie of its otherwise profoundly witnessed and distinctive stolen moments.

The story opens with Bobo arriving at The Red Dot, a seedy waterside nightclub where he tries to make the acquaintance of a ‘working’ girl whose boyfriend of the evening thinks otherwise. Bobo’s best friend is Tiny; a clingy, somewhat effete sadist who derives rather bizarre pleasure from snapping his wet towel against Nutsy’s naked buttocks. For some reason, Bobo never quite makes the connection Tiny is hot for him. Instead, Bobo meets Anna, a careworn prostitute who attempts to drown herself after she has been brutally gang raped. Bobo’s kindness resurrects Anna’s hopes for genuine happiness. Indeed, Bobo – who never considered women as anything but playthings, experiences a conversion to romantic love. He marries Anna, sending Tiny into a reckless desire to destroy them both by providing Bobo with a frame-up for a murder he has committed. After endeavoring to brutalize Anna, and, succeeding in crippling her, Tiny is hunted down by Bobo and forced onto a jetty in the fog where the surf consumes him.

In the original novel, Anna is raped and killed by Tiny, leaving Bobo to avenge his wife by murdering Tiny. Hollywood’s censorship prevented any of these plot points from reaching the screen, thereby blunting the impact of the story. Unfortunately for all concerned, Moontide did not do well at the box office. It also did not make Jean Gabin a star in America. In retrospect, it’s perhaps easy to see why. Gabin’s soothingly French charisma is vocally expressed, but emotionally suppressed by the awkward dialogue he is given - his deportment making for a really odd cross between Paul Henreid and Humphrey Bogart. Ida Lupino, who had departed Warner Brothers to freelance, was corralled into the Fox stable temporarily by Darryl F. Zanuck (her biggest fan on the lot). Still, and despite Zanuck’s great admiration for her, Lupino’s career at Fox was destined to hardly dazzle. Lupino was a good drinking buddy – that’s all. In Moontide, she turns in a rather sympathetic performance as damaged goods given a new lease on life, though her face – as yet to reveal the ravages of her hedonistic lifestyle – is still more kittenish than careworn. Thomas Mitchell’s closeted homosexual is not the actor’s finest hour. Neither is Claude Rains’ village idiot. Despite both men being exceptionally fine craftsmen and veritable cinema chameleons, Moontide unequivocally proved even Mitchell and Rains had their limitations.

Fox Home Video’s DVD is beautifully rendered. The image throughout is crisp, though never harsh. Presumably, Moontide did not get a lot of play time over the years, and thus, its elements survived the ravages of time. The gray scale exhibits exceptional tonality throughout with fine details evident even during night scenes. Age-related artifacts are present, but tempered, and film grain looks indigenous to its source. The audio is Dolby Digital 1.0 mono as originally sounds adequate. An audio commentary from Foster Hirsch is exceptionally thorough, while the featurette ‘Turning the Tide’ is a fairly accurate account of the film’s ill-fated production.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

2