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Moonrise



A small-town fable about violence and redemption, Moonrise is the final triumph of Frank Borzage, one of Hollywood's most neglected masters. Stigmatized from infancy by the fate of his criminal father, young Danny (Dane Clark) is bruised and bullied until one night, in a fit of rage, he kills his most persistent tormenter. As the police close in around him, Danny makes a desperate bid for the love of the dead man's fiancée (Gail Russell), a schoolteacher who sees the wounded soul behind his aggression. With this postwar comeback, Borzage recaptured the inspiration that had animated his long and audacious early career, marrying the lyrical force of his romantic sensibility with the psychological anguish of film noir in a stunning vindication of faith in the power of love.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New conversation between author Hervé Dumont (Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic) and film historian Peter Cowie
• PLUS: An essay by critic Philip Kemp

My favourite announcement of this month!

This is an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful film. My film professor in college, a Borzage cultist, showed this to us and I was blown away. Regardless of the paucity of extras (though if you're going to interview someone about Borzage, Dumont is who you should interview), the real event is that this is available at all in what I presume will be an excellent copy.

oh such sweet news ! another movie with Gail Russell (I fell in love with her when I saw her in The Univited (such a great video essay by the way!)
F.Brozage's movies are so moving - "Lucky Star", etc... and "fortunately" I've never seen this movie... I'm glad to discover it... (expecting that it will be perhaps darker than F.Brozage earlier movie I will prepare a full stock of kleenex TM) So this will be a direct pre-order...

Thank you, thank you, Criterion. An extraordinary film, a masterpiece.

I'll be the first voice of dissent. I know many people I respect love this movie, but I don't get out of it whatever they got. I think this is an awful movie and I hated the mishmash of tones and lousy performances (save Allyn Joslyn). Bad Girl is a masterpiece. This is something else. The cult built around this movie in the last couple years is inexplicable, and I wonder if it being widely available will feed or quell its elevated placement after it no longer is a film fetish object like Out 1 et al

I haven't seen Borzage's later work, but I always wondered why Criterion didn't release any of his classic silents. In my opinion his work at Fox is up there with Murnau's Sunrise, and it's a shame that his films are still somewhat neglected. I'm usually not into heavy melodramas at all, but – and I believe Scorsese mentioned this as well – there's a complete lack of irony in his films, they are very pure, and they get to me every time. Of course Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell also help accomplish this. The end of Street Angel didn't work for me, but I was blown away by both 7th Heaven, Lucky Star and even Lazybones. The River has got to be one of those lost masterpieces. Even the version with stills and text added in place of the missing footage was amazing. I bought the French Carlotta blu-rays last month just before they went OOP (I believe that Lucky Star is the only one still in print, for those interested).

With those bare special features, I'm surprised this retails for $39.95. Seems more like a The Uninvited or I Married a Witch. Has Criterion retired the 29.95 price for slimmer blus?

HitchcockLang wrote:With those bare special features, I'm surprised this retails for $39.95. Seems more like a The Uninvited or I Married a Witch. Has Criterion retired the 29.95 price for slimmer blus?

Thinking the same.

I know it doesn't say, "More!" like some releases do when they haven't listed the full features yet, but does anyone know why this one would be so barebones?

The Dumont/Cowie conversation is 27 hours long.

swo17 wrote:The Dumont/Cowie conversation is 27 hours long.

But 13 of those hours are Cowie's complete cocktail recipes, which makes this a must-buy.

domino harvey wrote:The cult built around this movie in the last couple years is inexplicable, and I wonder if it being widely available will feed or quell its elevated placement after it no longer is a film fetish object like Out 1 et al

the hyperbole of "inexplicable" aside (surely you can at least grasp why some appreciate this film, even if you dislike it), are there really many more people who like this film in the past few years than liked it, say, 20 or 40 years ago? My professor, a Borzage "cultist" since the '70s, showed it to his classes in the '90s, and some time in between those years, Dave Kehr wrote the following:

Frank Borzage's last masterpiece (1948) and one of his best-known films, although in many ways it's atypical of his work. Made on a middling budget for Republic Pictures—the studio of serials and cowboys—the film adopts a rich and elaborate expressionist style; with its shadows and tension-racked frames, it resembles no other film in the Borzage canon. The social conflicts that plagued Borzage's spiritually attuned lovers in earlier films here become psychological ones, as a young man (Dane Clark) fights to overcome his “bad blood”—his father was a convicted killer. Still, the Borzagian principle of transcendence applies, expressed through a complex mise-en-scene centered on circular camera movements. The earlier, disappointing Smiling Through (1941)—with its image of a blocking, ever-present past—seems a rough draft for this final achievement.

domino harvey wrote:I'll be the first voice of dissent. I know many people I respect love this movie, but I don't get out of it whatever they got. I think this is an awful movie and I hated the mishmash of tones and lousy performances (save Allyn Joslyn). Bad Girl is a masterpiece. This is something else. The cult built around this movie in the last couple years is inexplicable, and I wonder if it being widely available will feed or quell its elevated placement after it no longer is a film fetish object like Out 1 et al

Ok I saw it. I only knew F.Borzage silent movies (some) - which F.Borzage non-silence movie would you recommend ? Do you think that F.Borzage "lost the touch" when he stoped "silence-movies" ?
You are right there's a lot of flaws; improbable "plot" (you can't sense the threat -

Spoiler

I even wonder if I've really seen that there has been really a crime - like I thought I did see - and that the guy has just disappeared...

- then the movie "jump" into the relationship with Gail Russell (they were not suddenly in love) - like if there's missing a part of the movie. But this "bad edit" - deliberate or unfortunate - can give to this movie a dream-nightmare-like structure.
bad cast choice for the doomed "bad" guy. He's not likeable/"loveable". He doesn't seem very "expressive". But after all, that's one of the main point of the whole story.
Since I've the video-essay for The Univited I'm in love with Gail Russell and I learn how she was "uncomfortable" when acting... I can't tell, it's just like Gene Tierney. She's absolutely stunning in this movie and there's this look in the eyes which says a lot more than the whole main character (Dane Clark).
It doesn't have the long unavoidable threatened of the superb "They Live By Night" - we can not feel it.

But there's an incredible photography. And some stunning short scenes which worth this movie to be seen and buy. The opening 5 minutes are amazing and some cineast could take a whole movie to get such tension and trying to demonstrate the same thing. How he sum-up the childhood in less than 10 minutes with some striking visual composition

Spoiler

the puppet hanging over the bed of the children is a "hanged-man" pupper

. The next 5 minutes are as good and sum up in a poetic/impressionist way (the use of shadows!) what could have sum up the point of "In Cold Blood" (which is flawless contrary to "Moonrise")- I was totally hooked. Sometimes I was thinking about some early black & white Tarkovsky or the opening of Orson Welles "Othello" (for the use of shadows)
There's a lot of poetic and powerful scenes (the one where is is discussing about "the bad and good", the poor-cute animal chase...etc...) makes me think about the photography of The Night Of The Hunter.
The main problem in my humble opinion is the plot, the editing, the coherence of the narrative- but it has a striking power with some powerful scenes (and there's a lot - which is not bad after all for a movie which last less than 90 minutes) - where we found the poignant force of F.Borzage earlier's movies and the poetic I know and love from his movies "Lucky Star", "Bad Girl", etc...

Thus, for these moments of pure cinema grace, and Gail Rusell I loved this movie. The irony is that this movie seems to be as cursed and doomed as what F.Borzage tried to show.
From a "cinema" point of view, this movie has some powerful, poetic force - but the counterpoint is that this poetic, poignant, romantic and doomed funeral dirge is plagued by an "erratic" narrative. The most striking parts are the one without dialogue. (I'm sorry if I can't explain it better but I'm French and it's difficult sometimes to speak clearly what I have in mind)

Isn't Bad Girl (the film Domino recommended) itself a talkie?

Rupert Pupkin wrote:From a "cinema" point of view, these movies has some powerful, poetic force - but the counterpoint is that this poetic, poignant, romantic and doomed funeral dirge is plagued by an "erratic" narrative.

I think this is a fair assessment! In some ways it's like Night of the Hunter, a film whose remarkable, jaw-dropping poetic effusions sit side-by-side with some clumsy expository scenes, and an abrupt and poorly realized conclusion. I think that "erratic" quality is one thing that make these "cult" films, in that one seems either to be able to forgive (or even learn to appreciate) the clumsier aspects or to find them fatal—with not a lot of folks falling in the middle. I love Moonrise while I only like Hunter, but that might be because the latter doesn't need champions too badly at this point, while the former—until now, I suppose—has been pretty obscure.

FWIW you are much clearer and more expressive in your second language than many here are in their first.

Considering its MSRP is the regular one, I expected the extra to be a tad longer than this.

Is more Borzage supposed to be coming? I don't think Criterion would have gone all the way to Switzerland for one 17 minute interview.

Swo's hilarious photoshop gets to a core of what I disliked about this movie. Sure, it is gorgeously shot, but that only adds up to the Night of the Hunter connections which makes this movie's flaws seem all the more apparent and any cult devoted to it all the stranger. Both films deal with the idea of the sins of the father visited upon the son through a fairy tale experience. Laughton does so in a way to highlight how oppressive the evil in us can seem by externalizing that quality. It's a rather metaphysical point fitting well with the film's style.

Borzage on the other hand seems to be making a political film where the initial act of violence does no reparation. That's an interesting idea, but the script fails him. The instigating act is separated by our story through society. Therefore capital punishment is not the issue, but how we view people. Hawkin's father could as easily been sent up the river for a couple of years for theft or drug possession and the movie could come to the same place. So, unless we are arguing like Angela Davis for a post punishment world the story doesn't work. The movie doesn't seem to be arguing that though as its concern is consistently with death (e.g. the car accident) and if it somehow were arguing that then having such high crimes undermines the point. In short the film is thematically discombobulated to the point of incoherence. An incoherence that the film's tone and performance style matches.

That gets to our lead. He's given a part psychological reason for his nature, but being bullied doesn't give anyone the right to act the way he does here. Normally I'm very sympathetic to these sort of broken characters, just look at my comments in the Election thread, but this guy is mostly just a jerk. We don't see anything anymore serious then what many kids experience. The film does hint at stuff with the aunt and grandmother, but hints aren't enough to effect what we see and what I saw was a silly little man child who is cruel to everyone and instantly goes to violence the second he doesn't get his way.

The film does have a lot of potential to be good though. The pacing is top notch which given the wild shifts in tone and the inclusion of some very random scenes is an impressive feat. I also really love how down with the people the film seems to be. This really gives a sense of the transition between different youth cultures and how awkward a time the culture was in '48. Just compare the jive talking soda jerk to the title song at the beginning. It's a very fascinating aspect to a not terribly fascinating film.