Moontide

One of two American made films that Jean Gabin did in Hollywood while in exile from his beloved France is this item Moontide. It's not anywhere in the class of The Grand Illusion, Pepe LeMoko, or La Bete Humaine in fact it goes over into melodrama. Still it's a good showcase for his talent and appeal.

Gabin is a happy go lucky sailor who is beached with his pal Thomas Mitchell in the small coast town of San Pablo in California. He's a nasty drunk however who can be provoked to violence and has been. Another waterfront denizen Arthur Aylesworth is killed and Gabin is tormented by the fact that he was on one big bender the night of the homicide and it could be him.

But that doesn't stop him from saving the life of Ida Lupino who tries to drown herself because of her own relationship problems. These two fall for each other and they plan to settle in San Pablo and marry. And of course there's no room for Mitchell in the new setup.

Which doesn't please Mitchell at all. He's basically a leech who's attached himself to Gabin and he doesn't want to give up his meal ticket. Claude Rains who is a droll waterfront philosopher calls him a pilot fish which is a fish that hangs around sharks and lives off the scraps they leave. Time for Mitchell to find another shark.

Given that this is the Code era and that a major studio 20th Century Fox produced Moontide the rather obvious homosexual attachment of Mitchell to Gabin is hard to miss. Perhaps that is something that the original director Fritz Lang might have explored a bit more. In fact the film could have been a classic had Lang stayed with it.

Still the cast acquit themselves well in Moontide and a film with Jean Gabin is always something special.

and a good one at that. Gabin plays a rough drifter along California's fishery coast who rescues a girl (Ida Lupino) from a suicide attempt. He takes her to his floating bait shack and the two fall in love. Unlikely storyline takes a back seat to the acting of Gabin and Lupino as well as Claude Rains as the local "failed intellectual." Great waterfront sets certainly help this moody tale. Only Thomas Mitchell seems to overplay his hand as the treacherous friend. Jean Gabin was a European favorite for 45 years, and it's easy to see why in this film. Too bad he didn't stay in Hollywood a little longer, but the war was on. Also in the film as Jerome Cowan (in a subplot that seems to have been trimmed), Tully Marshall, Vera Lewis, Helene Reynolds, and Victor Sen Yung.

Here we have the 28 year-old Ida Lupino, looking more like 19 or 20, and already the veteran of more than thirty films, being a frail, charming, and vulnerable waif. She is thoroughly convincing, and we would all like to take her in and look after her. This duty falls to the gruff Jean Gabin, a hard-drinking waterfront drifter from port to port, who has at some point arrived in the States from France. In fact, Gabin in real life had fled the Nazi Occupation and this was one of two American films which he made in exile. The film was supposed to be directed by Fritz Lang, who would have made it a moodier and darker piece. However, he was replaced by the more cheerful Archie Mayo, so we get a film whose real value is not as cinema but as encounter between Lupino and Gabin. That keeps us watching. Claude Rains gives bemused support as a California waterfront bum (hardly his usual type of role!) and Thomas Mitchell is an unctuous, scheming villain who has conned Gabin into thinking he has 'something on him'. The film is rather sinister, and in many ways pointless. If it weren't for Lupino and Gabin being so fascinating, nobody would bother to watch this movie, as it falls between many stools. But Lupino is so entrancing in this role, that presumably no one really cares about the story anyway. And listening to Jean Gabin speak heavily accented English in California is so extraordinary that one wants to watch that too. Who gives a damn about the film, we've got Lupino and Gabin, and that's all that matters. They could read the telephone directory as far as I am concerned, and I would still watch.

Wow! Poetic realism, Hollywood style. MOONTIDE was originally assigned to Fritz Lang as director, but he was replaced by Archie Mayo and we may never know how much difference this made in the final film. Whatever its production history may be, this is a magnificent example of artistic use of black-and-white cinematography and set design. There is a palpable atmosphere, a sense of place (though it's never specified by name. We just know it's set on the California coast) that's downright captivating. So strong is the visual style--with its constructed sets, artfully lit, often cast in semi-darkness-- that it very often overwhelms the drama, though never throwing the balance off altogether. This is poetic realism, in what is usually termed the French style of the 1930s-40s, in a Hollywood context. The generally European feeling remains strong with the presence of Jean Gabin in the lead role. His committed performance dominates the film, only partly due to his strong French accent. It's probably a shame that the actor chose to discontinue work in American films after this and one more film, because he is so strong here. The other actors--all very good ones, Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchell, Claude Rains,Jerome Cowan all seem under the spell of the film's style and they work perfectly with, or against, Gabin's character. Watching MOONTIDE (a poetic title if there ever was one), one might wonder if it misses greatness only by its origin. Had Lang stayed with it, would we have something comparable to the masterworks of Carné or Renoir? As it is, the film comes close enough to be ranked only slightly lower. In the case of this movie, "underrated" is an understatement.

Moontide (1942)

What a surprise, and with some well known actors in little known roles. And one little known actor in the U.S., the great French star Jean Gabin. All put together in an elegant, fast, and sympathetic way.

The story is rather sweet, a love story between two unlikely loners, the charming and volatile hard drinking Bobo, played by Gabin, and the young and troubled Anna, played by Ida Lupino. Each of their pasts looms and interferes in the romance, mainly through the maliciousness of Bobo's old friend, another violent man played by Thomas Mitchell. And then there is the incomparable Claude Rains (you won't recognize him in the first scenes with his beard), who plays a truly good friend. All of this takes place in a little fishing shack at a big stone breakwater on the California Coast somewhere, and most of it takes place at night.

Archie Mayo, who made a lot of really good films and few if any masterpieces ("Petrified Forest" is his most famous, from 1936), really does show mastery of storytelling here. And with cinematography by Charles Clarke good enough to get an Oscar nomination (with some help by the more famous Lucien Ballard), you can see why this is better than most. Fritz Lang is shown as a co-director behind the scenes, and you get suspicious that the visual strength of all this is partly his doing.

But it is the story itself that might be the achilles heel here--it progresses with some twists that are suggested in the first few minutes, and that don't turn and surprise us later. The end is the end you expect, all neatly packaged.

Not that you don't mind so much--the leading characters are, if nothing else, very likable. But along those same lines, I think every scene is filmed by-the-book. Very likable, and competent, and rather beautiful all along, but lacking the edges of uncertainty, of emotional depths you would expect from these kinds of characters, even of drama in the few scenes of violence. "Moontide," with its poetic title, insists somehow that it is a just a performance and an entertainment, a light romance, even though it's just an inch from tipping into something much bigger.