Moontide (1942)

Moontide was the picture that was supposed to launch Jean Gabin as a Hollywood star. Like almost everything else connected with this movie it didn’t work out as intended, but it’s still a fascinating movie.

Filming started on this 20th Century Fox production in November 1941 but it had already encountered numerous obstacles and its troubles were only just beginning. The Production Code Authority had absolutely vetoed the original screenplay. The original writer, Nunnally Johnson, was replaced by John O’Hara. Jean Gabin insisted on major changes to the script. Studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck insisted on further major changes. Soon after shooting began director Fritz Lang walked off the picture. Plans to film on location had to be scrapped. As a result it’s a bit of a mess in some ways but paradoxically many of these problems ended up working in the movie’s favour.



It’s a kind of film noir fairy tale love story. French dock worker Bobo (Gabin) arrives in San Pedro, California. He meets up with his old buddy, Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), who has a job lined up for him. Bobo celebrates his arrival by getting so drunk that when he wakes up next morning he has no memory of the night before. Nor does he have any idea how he ended up on a bait barge in the harbour. The arrival of the Chinese owner of the barge, Henry, clarifies things slightly. Bobo and Henry had ended up drinking together and Henry had offered him a job, selling bait.

Bobo’s initial reaction after this is to move on as quickly as possible, but then fate steps in. A young woman tries to drown herself and he saves her. The woman is Anna (Ida Lupino). Like Bobo she’s an outsider and she has a past although we never actually find out any details of either her past or Bobo’s for that matter. That’s mainly due to problems with Production Code Authority. In the original novel and in the early version of the screenplay Anna is a prostitute and Bobo is a man who has had many lady friends, quite a few of whom had followed Anna’s profession.



All this had to be cut but in some ways that strengthens the film. Enough is left to suggest that both have seen quite a bit of life, and to lead us to suspect that both have had colourful pasts, but the fact that we don’t know the details gives them both an odd kind of innocence. All we really need to know is that both of them are outsiders, homeless strays.

Bobo takes Anna back to the barge to recuperate. He’s a tough guy with a fiery temper but he’s the sort of tough guy who would take in a bird with a broken wing. Like Anna. He has a gentle side to his character and it responds to her immediately. She obviously not used to men showing this type of tenderness, and it doesn’t take her too long to realise that she likes it.



Their blossoming love soon faces some obstacles. Tiny has a weird kind of hold on Bobo and Tiny dislikes Anna. He apparently dislikes any woman that Bobo likes. Tiny more or less lives off Bobo - he arranges jobs for Bobo and then pockets half the paycheques. There has also been a murder - an old and rather unfriendly character named Pop Kelly who happens to have been drinking at the same bar as Bobo on the day Bobo arrived in town. Since Bobo remembers nothing of this night, and since Bobo’s friend Nutsy (Claude Rains) finds Pop Kelly’s cap in the barge, we suspect that either Bobo was involved or someone was trying to frame him. It’s not long before Tiny puts this idea into Anna’s head.

The odds seem stacked against the two ill-starred lovers. They set up housekeeping on the barge and they are soon talking of marriage but Tiny is determined to thwart their plans.

The film’s reticence about the characters’ pasts and the downplaying of Bobo’s violence were the results of demands made by both the Production Code and Darryl F. Zanuck. The influence of the Code on Hollywood films in the 30s and 40s is today almost universally viewed as being pernicious and disastrous, as is the kind of studio interference that Zanuck indulged in. In practice however the results were not always entirely destructive and in this case Zanuck’s instincts were undoubtedly correct. The changes forced on the writers have the effect of making both Bobo and Anna much more sympathetic and also much more vulnerable. They give the two central characters a kind of innocence that makes their outsider status much more poignant. We desperately want them to make it and that gives the movie a much greater emotional impact. We feel that they are ill-equipped to deal with a hostile world.



Jean Gabin did not find favour with American audiences at the time and he made only one more film in Hollywood before returning permanently to France. Gabin could not adapt to the Hollywood system of movie-making. That’s perhaps a pity since his performance is extremely good.

Ida Lupino is even better. This is a more vulnerable Lupino than usual and she gives a marvellously subtle performance. Claude Rains was cast against type as the scruffy but wise Nutsy and his performance is very unselfish - Rains could chew scenery with the best of them but he backs off in this picture allowing Gabin and Lupino to maintain centre stage. The big surprise is Thomas Mitchell as Tiny. Mitchell usually played loveable types but Zanuck insisted he’d be wonderful as the sinister Tiny, and Zanuck was right.



Visually the movie is extraordinary. Charles G. Clarke was nominated for an Oscar for his cinematography and deservedly so. It’s a mix of visual styles - there’s a lot of film noir and quite a bit of German Expressionism but it owes its biggest debt to the French poetic realist films of the 30s. This may have been indirectly due to Jean Gabin. The visual approach is strikingly reminiscent of Marcel Carné’s 1938 French hit Port of Shadows which starred Gabin. It’s impossible to believe that Moontide wasn’t influence by that film. One suspects that with Gabin as the star someone at 20th Century-Fox must have watched Carné’s film and decided that the look of that film would be perfect for this one. There’s also a debt to Salvador Dali, who did the original drawings for Moontide’ s celebrated drunken dream sequence. Zanuck also had a major input and at least one important (and very effective) scene was entirely Zanuck’s idea.

Part of the look of the movie was entirely fortuitous. The outbreak of war on December 7 1941 meant that plans to film on location at San Pedro had to abandoned so the studio recreated the harbour setting on a sound stage. This magnificent set, combined with the fog-shrouded cinematography, gives the movie an incredibly artificial look. It’s as if the four main characters are trapped in a strange fairy tale word of their own, with Bobo as the hero, Anna as a kind of princess of the slums, Tiny as the wicked witch and Nutsy as the fairy godmother. This fairy tale ambience suits the material perfectly and proves to be the best thing about the film.



Fritz Lang was director for the first two-and-a-half weeks of filming (before Archie Mayo took over) and many of the scenes he shot remain in the film, although apparently no-one is now sure which scenes they are. Lang and Gabin clashed repeatedly on set but both wanted the movie to be more doom-laden and pessimistic and disagreed vehemently with Zanuck on the general direction the film should take. Much as I revere Lang and Gabin I think Zanuck understood the material better than they did.

Moontide was not a commercial success, probably because it’s so uncompromisingly non-realistic and really seems like a strange hybrid. It’s a combination of European and American sensibilities, of film noir and romance, of crime movie and fairy tale. Like Charles Laughton’s 1956 masterpiece Night of the Hunter (which resembles Moontide in many ways) it was a movie that contemporary audiences were not prepared for. Although by no means a perfect film it’s a strange and rather wonderful experience which I recommend very highly.

The DVD in the Fox Film Noir series looks sensational and includes some terrific extras.

Stormy Waters (1941)

Jean Grémillon’s Stormy Waters (Remorques) isn’t quite in the style of the French film noir of the 30s (or poetic realism as it was also known) as I’d hoped, but it does have enough in common with that style to make it interesting. And it’s a good film in its own right.

Although released in 1941 it was apparently shot a couple of years earlier. Given the fact that France was going through the trauma of war and the Occupation at the time we’re probably fortunate the movie was completed and released at all. The plot is extremely simple but that’s one of the movie’s strengths. It’s the response of the characters to events that matters.

André Laurent (Jean Gabin) is the captain of an ocean-going tug, the Cyclone. The salvage and rescue work by which he and his crew make their loving is lucrative but dangerous. André has no real choice though. The sea is in his blood. His wife Yvonne would like him to give up the sea. He keeps promising to do so but of course he never does.

Events come to a crisis for André when the Cyclone attempts to tow in a stricken freighter, the Mirva. The Mirva’s captain is strangely indifferent to the fate of his ship. His wife Catherine (Michèle Morgan) is on board and it appears that their marriage is, like the ship, drifting helplessly towards the rocks. In fact his wife takes to one of the lifeboats and is picked up by the Cyclone.

The attraction between André and Catherine is immediate. Catherine tells André that she and her husband are through. We see to have here a setup for a classic romantic triangle but it turns out to be more complicated than that. There are in fact three rivals for André’s love - Catherine his wife Yvonne, and the sea itself. Yvonne and the sea are very similar - they both demand unconditional love and absolute commitment, and both are capable of overwhelming the unwary sailor and dragging him down into the depths.

Everything in the movie relates to the sea or ships. The Cyclone’s job is to rescue ships that are adrift. The lives of all the major characters are also adrift. They are not unhappy because they are weak or bad or selfish. They’ve simply failed to choose a definite course and to maintain it, and have not realised that without a steady hand on the tiller you will always be in danger of shipwreck.

The attraction between André and Catherine is not quite what you expect, given the conventions of romantic movies. Catherine does not represent the stormy waters of uncontrollable sexual passion; rather she represents for André a safe port. He feels comfortable with her. But to reach that safe haven he will have to navigate his way through some treacherous emotional waters.

The ending is emotionally wrenching and works superbly.

The movie benefits enormously from the extreme underplaying of both Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan. They had been paired very successfully a couple of years earlier in one of the great masterpieces of French cinema, Marcel Carné’s Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows). They have a wonderful chemistry that is all the more powerful for not being obvious and overtly sexual.

As you’d expect from a French movie of this period the black-and-white cinematography is very impressive, even in the slightly battered print that was screened on Australian cable TV.

Perhaps not quite in the same class as the very greatest French movies of that era such as Le quai des brumes and Hôtel du Nord but still a wonderful movie. Highly recommended.

Port of Shadows (1938)

Marcel Carné’s 1938 production Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) belongs to the “poetic realism” school of French cinema of the 1930s. It’s often regarded as a precursor of film noir. In fact it’s very film noir indeed.

It tells the story of a man who has deserted from the French army. We’re never told his reasons, although he does admit to having done terrible things in anger. It’s likely he has also been scarred by his experiences in Indo-China. He finds himself in a seedy waterfront bar, where he meets a girl Nelly, who is as alone and despairing as he is.

He also crosses the path of a painter whose despair has gone even further, and who bequeaths him his identity. More ominously, he also encounters Lucien, a cowardly but vicious small-time gangster, and Zabel, Nelly’s sleazy and creepy guardian. He and Nelly fall in love, but they never for a moment believe that they have a future.

The air of fatalism in this film is overwhelming. Not one of the characters has the will to avoid their fate. The fact that the movie was made in France in 1938, with Europe heading inexorably towards a cataclysm that no-one seemed to have the will to avoid, is undoubtedly very significant.

Jean Gabin brings a certain dignity to the role of the deserter Jean. Michèle Morgan is superb as Nelly. The acting in general is low key, which also add to the feeling of inescapable doom. The cinematography is moody and anticipates much of the feel of film noir. Lots of fog. The ending is predictable but then tragic endings are tragic because you can see them coming but somehow the characters are unable to do anything to avert their fate.

Compared to Hollywood films of the same era Port of Shadows is much more sexually frank, and much more grownup. There are no phoney tacked-on happy endings, and no tedious moralising at the end, in this movie. No-one deserves their fate, justice has not been done, life has simply crushed a few people because that’s what life does. A cynical but also a very romantic movie. Highly recommended.