Moonrise

Well! That was some picture!

I read about Moonrise in a blurb in the New Yorker the other day, mentioned because it’s currently streaming on the Criterion Channel:

…Frank Borzage’s melancholy and mysterious 1948 film noir, “Moonrise.” Borzage, who, in 1929, won an Oscar for Best Director, was one of the most distinctive filmmakers of his time; his doom-laden romanticism pervades the movie’s visual style as well as its drama. It’s set in a small Virginia town, where a young man named Danny (Dane Clark), whose father was hanged for murder, has grown up as an outcast. He’s in love with a schoolteacher named Gilly (Gail Russell); after he kills his tormentor and rival (Lloyd Bridges), he eludes the law and wins Gilly’s heart even as the double anguish of his guilt and his heritage drives him to a destructive frenzy. With swooping, God’s-eye crane shots and ominous shadows, Borzage conjures the spiritual realm of sin and redemption in which the accursed Danny is enmeshed, and its worldly counterpart is found in Danny’s bonds with the town’s other outsiders, including an elderly Black hermit named Mose (Rex Ingram), who speaks frankly of the indignities that he fled.

So I watched it the other night and found it visually fascinating and thematically absorbing. It’s about the Sins of the Fathers, individual responsibility, scapegoating and the more general question of criminal justice: how does society punish crime, what’s the point, and what’s the effect?

This lengthy piece at Pop Matters focuses on the issue of justice and the death penalty, but also gives a careful reading of the film, which I highly recommend. They have some magic gizmo system over there that prevents copying-and-pasting, so I can’t be lazy and just construct the rest of this post from quotes from that piece. Well, that’s too bad,.

Anyway, Moonrise is, indeed, visually arresting, filled with interesting characters – a soda jerk who self-consciously and annoyingly speaks only in the latest slang – and some familiar faces , even to the casual modern television and film viewer (Lloyd Bridges as a bully, Harry Morgan – of MASH – as a deaf-mute). It’s a nuanced exploration of the theme of individual culpability under the weight of the past. Even the Magical Negro in the cast, played by the marvelous Rex Ingram, is depicted with subtlety.

It’s a 90-minute back and forth about these matters, intriguingly and sharply shot.

Here’s the opening scenes:

There’s one character whose comic response to every new person who enters his sight is actually more than comic, and provides an unexpected, concise summation of the plot. An old coot who spends his days sitting on park benches with his friends, he greets those he encounters by bending towards the closest friend and barking, “Who’s boy?” As in – I can understand who this person is if I understand his family connections – but can we?

In a way, yes, but that’s our constant struggle, even if we don’t bear the burden of our father’s execution. To acknowledge where we came from and its impact on us – but not be defined or controlled by it, at all.

It’s that impact – the effect of all the acceptance, rejection, resentment, hope, hate and love – on individual actions that Moonrise invites us to engage with, and to ultimately ask those questions – why do we do what we do? And….what impact do those motivations, conscious and unconscious, have on how we treat the wrongdoer?

For as the sheriff reflects:

If you went into all the reasons why that rock struck Jerry’s head, you might end up writing the history of the world.

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Note:

Borzage had Catholic roots, and many place him, along with John Ford and Frank Capra, as a Hollywood director whose work displays a distinctive Catholic sensibility – in his case, the power of redemptive love, and I would argue, an acceptance of the complexity of human nature and social relations. That certainly comes through in Moonrise. For a longer treatment of this matter, see this article in Crisis (originally published in 1998).

Strange Cargo — certainly an unusual film for its time, with its mix of sensuality and spirituality — was condemned by the Legion of Decency, the Catholic watchdog group founded in 1934 to ensure the enforcement of Hollywood’s self-censorship code. The controversy is recounted in the well-researched book by Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship (1996). The Legion deemed offensive the portrayal of the Christ-like figure and irreverent the use of the Scripture. Time has shown the Legion was woefully shortsighted in its judgment of one of the most Catholic films made in Hollywood.

The conflict with the Legion of Decency encapsulates the difficulty of understanding Borzage as a filmmaker with a Catholic view of the human experience. Borzage-the-man did not speak publicly about his religious beliefs, but Borzage-the-artist believed — and his work shows — that the spirit matters more than the letter of the law. The experience of beauty — generally through music — performs a radical transformation, as delicately summarized in the television play The Day I Met Caruso (1956), where a little Quaker girl’s austere view of joy is changed forever. (Like Babette’s Feast, this work contrasts Catholic and Protestant sensibilities.) Goodness, beauty, and truth — attributes of God — move a person, a couple, a family, and a community to transcend the limits imposed by a flawed human condition, become whole, and thus fulfill their humaneness. In his stories of conversion through love, there flows a predilection for the little people, for the weak, the wounded, the innocent, the children, for all God’s creatures blessed by Christ in the Sermon of the Mount. It was not by chance that Borzage’s last film was The Big Fisherman, and its climax that very passage of the Gospel. The director, an unprepossessing man, once remarked that the stories that most attracted him were the simple dramas of ordinary people, and that Hollywood had the moral obligation “to embody in the fundamentals of entertainment a point of view designed to enlighten as well as entertain.” In his films about love, beauty, suffering, and sacrifice Borzage translated the beatitudes of the Gospel to the Hollywood screen.