Moonrise

MOONRISE   ***

Frank Borzage

1948

IDEA:  Danny has been ridiculed and abused mercilessly since his father was hanged for shooting a man. After he kills one of his tormenters during a fight, he attempts to evade the consequences.

BLURB:  When a film comes out of the gate with as much brio as Moonrise, the likelihood of it sustaining such vigor is fairly low. It’s not exactly a surprise, then, that this is the case with Borzage’s film. Following a jolting opening, in which the traumatic history that haunts the protagonist is conveyed in paroxysms of expressionistic shadows and alarming cuts, the film settles into a more straightforward vein as Dane Clark’s Danny tries to outrun both his past and the law. Borzage and Russell’s rich visual palette remains, but the opening’s visceral shocks are replaced by more prosaic evocations of shame and guilt, symbolized by noose-like hangings and constricted, tenebrous spaces. Still, Borzage keeps an anguished and compassionate focus on Danny, and he keeps us shrewdly attuned to his psychological state. Through its audiovisual repetitions, the film displays both an understanding of anxiety’s circular structure and the ways it finds a correlative in the narrative and formal conventions of noir. Perhaps the ultimate success of Moonrise, however, is in how it finally breaks from those conventions to give its protagonist redemptive agency. Swerving away from the standard postwar fatalism, Borzage pronounces a belief in the ability of man to absolve himself from violence and trauma, mostly with the help of women’s love and wisdom. It’s earnest to a fault, but it’s also a relieving breath of air that lifts the film’s damp pall.