Strong and Moving!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Moonfleet (1955)A Fritz Lang oddity. If you are an admirer of this director's best movies (there are several knockouts), then you might want to plod through this one just to see his range. But it's basically aimed at young people with some adult threads, a variation on a Treasure Island or Kidnapped theme (Robert Louis Stevenson, that is), and it's fairly limited in its emotional range and in its plot.It's not that it's poorly made. In fact, for an early leap into widescreen color it has a lot of very dark night shooting that works well, and basically does what it intends. The problem is that it doesn't seem to intend to engage an adult with much intensity, and I'd have to guess it also lacks the magic and adventure a child needs, too. There's almost a pirate version of Bronte going on here--the old family mystery, the conversations between outcast members of a storied family, and so on.It doesn't help that the child star is stiff and unsympathetic at times, even when he gets in deep trouble. He's not so cute, or so lively, or so daring as a child star ought to be. (This reminds me of the lead in "Shane," who also deadens that film.) There are a couple of actors I usually appreciate a lot, like the great George Saunders who is fine here but rather by the book, and Viveca Lindfors who is the little known import who I often really like beyond her small reputation, and who here is also playing it straight. Too straight.Suspense? Absent. Even mystery about the plot (the missing diamond) is a bit unmysterious. Why? Why all the restraint and routine playing out of fairly common conflicts?All in all a strange entry in Lang's canon. If you have other options I'd skip this one. Or see a few minutes if you are curious and then be assured, it doesn't get much different, or better, as it goes. And start to ask what it is about the business of movie-making that leads directors with the intensity and originality of Fritz Lang into this kind of vehicle. Which, by the way, lost money on its substantial budget.

In anticipation for watching this movie, I pulled my "Children's Adventure" novel of "Moonfleet" down from the shelf and read it through. It's a cracking book, scarier, more realistic and certainly more involving than this Hollywood bowdlerisation, which pays scant heed to the narrative, introduces to the fore completely new characters - personified by the Granger/ Sanders / Greenwood triumvirate and basically allows the rest of the book's characters their names and almost nothing of their literary attributes. Of course there's a dash of sexiness too (for example, our first sight of Granger as the debonair but decadent Jeremy Fox is to the backdrop of a sexy gypsy dancer shaking her stuff up close and personal) but the screenplay suffers from a bittiness in trying to accommodate this with the main narrative thrusts of the book (the search for Mohune's diamond, the smuggling backdrop) but ultimately fails its source by a long way. Granger's jealous girlfriend, for another example, betrays him to the magistrate Maskew and then promptly disappears from view thereafter, to be replaced by the manipulative playgirl wife of the equally scheming but unwittingly cuckolded Lord Ashwood character played straightforwardly by an ageing George Sanders. The story which does emerge on the screen is still passable however and gets from start to finish tidily enough, concluding with Granger's sentimental / noble (you decide) sacrifice for his young protégé John Mohune (Trenchard in the novel)and the acting is fair to middling, no more than that. The child acting the young John Mohune character occasionally gets on your nerves as most Hollywood children do but by the end of the film, his presence is tolerable in a Mark Lester sort of way. As for the great Fritz Lang at the helm, you'd hardly know it, apart from one great shot near the start as the young boy comes around from unconsciousness to be greeted by a host of eerie faces crowding the camera lens. It's fair to say the film starts out in a darker vein than it finishes and is the poorer for the compromise, in the end playing like any number of real-life Disney-type adventures "Swiss Family Robinson", for example, here today, gone tomorrow in terms of entertainment value and for me slightly demeaning for a director of Lang's undoubted stature.

It is a long time since I read J Meade Falkner's novel, but I remember enough of it to realise that this film bears little resemblance to it. Around the middle of the eighteenth century John Mohune, the young son of a once-wealthy but now ruined aristocratic family, is sent after the death of his parents to stay with Jeremy Fox, the squire of the Dorset village of Moonfleet. Before her marriage to a cousin, Fox was the lover of John's mother, but they were prevented from marrying by the opposition of her family, who thought he was neither wealthy nor well-born enough for her. As the fortunes of the Mohunes have declined, however, so those of Fox have risen, and he is now the wealthiest man in the village, living in their ancestral mansion.Fox takes a liking to the boy, and a friendship grows up between them. Unknown to John, however, Fox is not the respectable country gentleman he appears. His main source of wealth is his involvement in the lucrative, but highly illegal, smuggling trade, and he has plans to go into partnership with Lord Ashwood, a local nobleman, in a venture which involves plundering foreign ships and which effectively falls little short of piracy. The debonair Fox is also something of a ladies man, with at least two mistresses, one of whom denounces him to the authorities when he tires of her. The main plot concerns Fox and John's search for a long-lost diamond which had once belonged to one of the Mohune family."Moonfleet" has similarities to "Treasure Island" although it is set in Britain rather than on a remote tropical island. The relationship between the likable rogue Fox (a name presumably chosen because of its connotations of cunning) and young John parallels that between Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins. The film has been aptly described as situated on the boundary between a traditional cape and sword adventure and a Gothic horror movie. The style of acting is more that of the swashbuckling adventure. Stewart Granger, taking over where Errol Flynn left off, made something of a speciality of dashing heroes in historical costume dramas ("Blanche Fury", "Saraband for Dead Lovers", "Scaramouche" and "Beau Brummell" are other examples) and he makes an attractive hero here. The other contribution that stands out is from George Sanders, always a good villain, as the corrupt aristocrat Ashwood.Director Fritz Lang, however, brings a very Gothic look to the film. Moonfleet may be situated on one of the most scenic counties in England, but it is no picturesque village. The atmosphere is often a dark, gloomy one, with numerous shots of the shabby alehouse or the mist-shrouded churchyard. Fox may be a likable rogue, but the smugglers are for the most part dangerous ones who would have no compunction about murdering a child. (There is a fine duel between Fox and one of their number fought to decide whether John should live or die after he inadvertently overhears their plans). This is not a great film, but is nevertheless a well-made, watchable adventure. 6/10

I saw this movie projected onto a screen, from the DVD, I think; it looked as good as old films usually do. I found it very enjoyable and was surprised that I had not seen it before. However, I feel gratified to read the complaints by one member here who could not figure out all the plot details: I couldn't, either! Now, after reading more information or speculation about the making of the film, I see why. I found that there is a whole website and society devoted to the author of the book, John Meade Falkner, and a biography of him was published not long ago.This is my first time viewing this website. I'm impressed by the quality of the comments; I'll definitely come back.