Critics reviews

Borzage returns to his silent-era roots, filling the screen with lyrical, expressionistic images of entrapment and tension to tell the story of a young man hunted and haunted by a legacy of violence and guilt. Few noir films are suffused with such compassion, or such a feeling for the na tural world and the traditions of rural life.

I've never been able to get a handle on this film, despite my eternal love of all things Borzage. I just don't end up caring for Dane Clark's protagonist, which places me at odds with the film's romantic leanings. But this is not a commonly help opinion, and Gail Russell is so good, her facial expressions and Borzage's close-ups making up for anything else the film may be lacking.

Moonrise isn’t really film noir — it takes the humanist point of view that criminals are not born, they’re made, and can be unmade — but it boasts some of the most gorgeous noir cinematography of the era, via John L. Russell. And though Moonrise certainly isn’t a horror movie, it has several genuinely frightening moments, including a jolter of an opening.

Borzage is concerned with the intricate symbiotic relationships between individuals and society at large. . . . Moonrise is less a violent film than a film about violence—one that’s occupied, in particular, with the lingering aftereffects of capital punishment. The film’s violent acts are intricately linked, each perpetuating the next in an expansive chain reaction.

For all the encroaching shadows, Moonrise succeeds in achieving romantic intensity. At one point, as Danny and Gilly dance together in their refuge—an abandoned mansion (significantly named Blackwater)—an ecstatic crane shot tracks back, soars up to gaze on them from the ceiling, then swoops back down into close-up as they kiss in silhouette. Max Ophuls might have given an approving nod.

The combination of black-book fatalism and dreamy night photography is all but one-of-a-kind (though anyone who attended last month's revival of Allan Dwan's SLIGHTLY SCARLET should be somewhat prepared); that the director wrests the tawdry material to fit his personal theme of transcendence is even more surprising.

Anyone could be forgiven for doubting that another Golden Age Old Master's name needs to be canonized, but look at this film's fairgrounds scene, a staple of any film staged in Small Town, USA. Not only do you get Moonrise's best sliver of detail work . . . but Borzage's bravura staging of Danny's opening up to Gilly on a ferris wheel, to the toot of "Oh, Susanna," is incontestably fine, fluid work, ramping in emotional pitch into a vertiginous freak-out.

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.