“Moontide” mixes human warmth and love with homicidal brutality, serves them straight and simple by way of some actual, living people named Tiny, Bobo and Anna, and an inferior plot doesn’t keep it from being a superb moving picture. Which is really gravy, because you pay your money to see the French importation, Jean Gabin, prove the rumor that he is screen actor number one and sex-appeal champ besides. Since he has the rare gift of pantomime, meaning the exact grimace and gesture for the feeling needed, along with a face which is both tough and soft, somewhat punched up like a prize-fighter’s, thin lips, innocent wavy hair, and a precocious underlip which drips words off in a personal sort of way, he probably wins on both counts. Despite this, he is no better than the girl, Ida Lupino, or the villain, Thomas Mitchell, or the direction of Archie Mayo. A picture moving and good.
The screen play is John O’Hara’s, and it has all of his clarity and feel for ordinary people living, talking and usually drinking. Something got at Archie Mayo—maybe it was Producer Mark Hellinger—and he directs it that way. But slowly. He has trouble getting the picture away, what with side, front and upside-down shots of Jean Gabin to introduce him to American audiences. Gabin in highlight or in shadow is vital and real to watch, even on such long solo spins. Mayo’s slowness focuses the interest on the people, and that’s where it belongs. You get to know each of them: Bobo the wandering, good-natured dock worker with a tendency toward getting drunk and choking somebody, his buddy Tiny, weak and ugly, the night-watchman Nutsy who doesn’t sleep, hasn’t since 1936. Around them all is a quality of human goodness and fraternity. There is a minimum of talk; the feeling comes from fine understanding of the personalities and their interrelationships.
After Gabin is thoroughly looked over, there is some trouble getting him drunk; they go on almost indefinitely showing you a drunken world through a tipsy camera. But once this is out of the way, the picture is started with one man choked to death and nobody knowing who did it except Bobo and Tiny, who have a good idea. Bobo then falls for the girl he has saved from suicide—that is Ida Lupino—they make wonderful movie love, get married, and Tiny tries to break it up. He almost breaks Ida instead; Bobo does Tiny in; and it ends somewhat as usual, the husband carrying the crippled bride into their renovated home.
The material sounds hackneyed, but it doesn’t look that way. Sincerity of feeling in acting and direction gives it an honest tenseness, with always the fear of a choking to destroy the gentle happiness. The climactic violence in which Anna is attacked will really startle you—Mitchell’s skillful performance of his bad man and the direction which has made it a forcefully dramatic value have built a suspense beautifully resolved in this scene.
There is a genuine performance turned in by Ida Lupino, the “Oh leave me alone, will you” girl, with less of the neurotic quality she usually relies on. Instead of acting with vivid tightness she makes Anna very ordinary and loving, and I haven’t seen such warmth since Elisabeth Bergner played Gemma Jones in “Escape Me Never.”
You’re getting off cheap just going for Jean Gabin.
“The Tuttles of Tahiti,” a Nordhoff-Hall story adapted by James Hilton, achieves nothingness with the same attitude and technical facility of a slick magazine story. Nobody was sincere here; it’s a string of dull incidents, banal acting and uninspired direction. The island is swarming with actors but the only living people are Charles Laughton and Victor Francen, and even they can’t rise above the material.
There isn’t even Laughton in a picture called “Twin Beds.”
May 11, 1942