Mister Dog
Moonrise (1948)
directed by Frank Borzage
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix
Like They Live by Night, Moonrise is as much about the men and women who aid and abet the protagonist as the crime he commits or the family guilt he tries to get out from under. The misty swampland where Gail Russell slouches her shoulders and sees through men with her pretty blue eyes is filled with watchful faces. These characters - and they are characters - know the score around town to a degree they don't let on. They're odd people, but good people, too, with kind advice and sympathy.
Russell is the landscape made flesh and bone, but barely. She never completely materializes from the shadows or carnival lights around her, and like the ghost of Danny's father or the ghosts in the empty, ruined room where Danny and Gilly dance, she can't hold on to the man she loves to keep him there beside her. Danny, to Borzage's credit, can be both stupid and mean, and Dane Clark's performance begs no quarter. The movie begins like a nightmare, with a tumbling car crash, a hanging montage, and physical threats made to another man's fiancée; the fever only breaks next to Gilly or a brakeman in the woods named Mose, and never for long.
"You'll catch up with him one of these days," the sheriff says, but the movie won't guarantee it, and Russell knew better. Must-stream TV.
directed by Frank Borzage
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix
Like They Live by Night, Moonrise is as much about the men and women who aid and abet the protagonist as the crime he commits or the family guilt he tries to get out from under. The misty swampland where Gail Russell slouches her shoulders and sees through men with her pretty blue eyes is filled with watchful faces. These characters - and they are characters - know the score around town to a degree they don't let on. They're odd people, but good people, too, with kind advice and sympathy.
Russell is the landscape made flesh and bone, but barely. She never completely materializes from the shadows or carnival lights around her, and like the ghost of Danny's father or the ghosts in the empty, ruined room where Danny and Gilly dance, she can't hold on to the man she loves to keep him there beside her. Danny, to Borzage's credit, can be both stupid and mean, and Dane Clark's performance begs no quarter. The movie begins like a nightmare, with a tumbling car crash, a hanging montage, and physical threats made to another man's fiancée; the fever only breaks next to Gilly or a brakeman in the woods named Mose, and never for long.
"You'll catch up with him one of these days," the sheriff says, but the movie won't guarantee it, and Russell knew better. Must-stream TV.
posted by NPK at 5:43 AM
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