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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Stalking Moon by T.V. Olsen The Stalking Moon. We go to thrillers expecting to be frightened; good thrillers work by frightening us when we're not on guard. Hitchcock's terror never occurs when his heroine enters the sinister passage; it happens in daylight, without warning. He had a lot of fun bumping off Janet Leigh while she was taking a shower in "Psycho" (1960). Who would expect the star to be killed right at the beginning of the movie? And in a shower? The same was true of that moment in "Wait Until Dark," when Alan Arkin leaped out of the shadows at Audrey Hepburn. People routinely leap out of shadows in thrillers; what are shadows for? But they don't leap after we're convinced they're dead. We were still recovering from the struggle; we were still relieved that the blind girl had killed the psychopath -- and THEN he leaped. The trouble with "The Stalking Moon" is that it frightens us in all the regulation ways. Eva Marie Saint goes into the bedroom, and a sinister arm reaches out and shuts the door behind her. So what? The scene was set up for that; we were expecting it. Gregory Peck and Robert Forster were up in the hills, and the old man was out of earshot, and so when Eva Marie Saint went into the bedroom the Indian was inevitably there waiting for her. Hitchcock would have put an extra beat into the scene: Eva Marie Saint pausing a moment before going into the bedroom, then going in and nobody is there. She sighs, relaxes, comes out into the room she had just left -- and THERE he is! The other horrors in "The Stalking Moon" are of the same variety: The Indian leaps out of bushes at Peck, but only after Peck poses in front of the bushes. We're supposed to believe the Indian is a wraithlike, superhuman figure who draws on centuries of craft and folklore to run rings around the white man. We're supposed to fear him because he comes silently, without warning, a spirit in the night. But the Indian bungles it. We see him all the time, we hear him coming, he survives until the end of the movie only because Peck and Forster are such lousy shots. In one scene, Peck waits in ambush as the Indian nudges open the cabin door and slips inside. Peck has him silhouetted in the doorway; the Indian doesn't see him. I'm mentally urging Peck: Aim the gun, dammit! Shoot him! You've got him! Peck blows it. So the movie doesn't work as a thriller. It doesn't hold together as a Western, either. The story involves a white woman and her half-breed son who are rescued from the Apaches by Peck and the U.S. Cavalry. Peck undertakes to guide the woman to civilization, and along the way decides to offer her a job cooking for him in New Mexico. The three are stalked by the Apache. The woman was his wife for 10 years, and the boy is his son. Under the circumstances, the Apache has a point. But Peck, reflecting the subtle racism that underlies the plot, assumes the Indian deserves to die. To be sure, the Indian massacres half of Arizona on his way to the showdown -- but since the movie makes no point of that, why should we? The relationship between Peck and Miss Saint is only sketched; we see none of the tenderness and awkward communication of, say, the similar situation in "Will Penny." All that redeems the film are a few moments of authentic Western life: a stationmaster selling an incredibly complicated ticket to Topeka, Peck urging the woman to talk at dinnertime, Forster teaching the boy to play poker. Films similar to or like The Stalking Moon. 1965 American drama film based on Gavin Lambert's 1963 novel of the same name, directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Natalie Wood. It follows a tomboy who becomes a Hollywood actress and singer. Wikipedia. 1967 American drama film directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Sandy Dennis, Patrick Bedford, Eileen Heckart, and Jean Stapleton. The plot concerns the first, trying assignment for a young, idealistic teacher. Wikipedia. 1965 American drama film directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Lee Remick, Steve McQueen and Don Murray. Glen Campbell's film debut, in an uncredited role. Wikipedia. 1971 American Western film directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gregory Peck. Adapted from Will James's 1930 novel, The Lone Cowboy. Wikipedia. 1961 American Technicolor Western film starring and directed by Marlon Brando; it was the only film he directed. Originally planned to be directed by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay by Sam Peckinpah, but studio disputes led to their replacement by Brando and Guy Trosper. Wikipedia. 1970 American neo noir drama film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld. It tells the story of Sheriff Henry Tawes (Peck) who develops a relationship with a girl in town, Alma McCain (Weld). Wikipedia. 1958 American epic Western film directed by William Wyler, and starring Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, and Burl Ives. The supporting cast features Charles Bickford and Chuck Connors. Wikipedia. 1950 Technicolor western film starring Alan Ladd, Mona Freeman, Charles Bickford, and Robert Keith. Adapted from the novel Montana Rides by Max Brand under pen name Evan Evans. Wikipedia. 1959 American spy thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. By Ernest Lehman, who wanted to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures". Wikipedia. 1958 American western film directed by Henry King, starring Gregory Peck and Joan Collins. Based on a novel of the same name, written by Frank O'Rourke. Wikipedia. 1948 American western film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, and Anne Baxter. Believed to be loosely adapted from William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Wikipedia. List of American films released in 1968'''. Oliver! won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Wikipedia. 1967 American Technicolor film adaptation of the 1965 novel of the same name written by Arthur Hailey. The film stars Rod Taylor, Catherine Spaak, Karl Malden, Kevin McCarthy, Michael Rennie, Merle Oberon, and Melvyn Douglas. Wikipedia. 1963 American romantic comedy drama film made by Pakula-Mulligan Productions and Boardwalk Productions and released by Paramount Pictures. Directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Alan J. Pakula from a screenplay by Arnold Schulman. Wikipedia. 1972 comedy film starring Bob Hope and Eva Marie Saint, and directed by Paul Bogart. Bob Hope's last of over 50 theatrical features as leading man, a screen run begun in 1938. Wikipedia. 1968 American Technicolor western war film in Panavision directed by Buzz Kulik and starring Yul Brynner as Francisco Villa and Robert Mitchum as an American adventurer and pilot of fortune. The supporting cast includes Charles Bronson as Fierro, Herbert Lom as Huerta and Alexander Knox as Madero. Wikipedia. 1968 American Technicolor Western film directed by James Goldstone starring Tony Franciosa, Michael Sarrazin and Judi West. Remake of Man Without a Star . Wikipedia. Safe at Home. In 2009, anything shot through old lenses is bound to find a home in the hearts of at least a few film lovers. “Unwanted” specular highlights and veiling glare are treasured imperfections, and day for nights and unreal night-lighting are happily tolerated or even overlooked. Every piece of predigital cinema now seems to be cherished, and in the joyously inflationary economy of Internet cinephilia, where every corner of the past is being busily rummaged, maestros and masterpieces are proliferating. Of course, in light of today’s average product, everything pre-1990 really does look good. But to encounter a genuinely great film like The Stalking Moon is something else again. Not that this late-1968 Robert Mulligan item is lost or even unknown, nor is it a film maudit. It is best described as unredeemed. On January 23, 1969, the then newly minted movie critic Vincent Canby judged Mulligan’s sole Western “a rather pious, unimaginative suspense film” that “moves stolidly forward with more dignity than excitement,” not unlike its star (Gregory Peck) who “must be thinking about his duties on the board of the American Film Institute, rather than on survival.” Studying a 40-year-old Times review won’t take anyone very far on the road to enlightenment, but the preponderance of terms from the same strain of judgmentalism is interesting. Canby’s put-downs belong to the same family as “likeable but somewhat ineffectual and undynamic” (Robin Wood) and “terribly conscientious” (Pauline Kael). Reading such descriptions today, one might ask: “In comparison to what?” To Godard, Fellini, Bergman, The Graduate , Bonnie and Clyde , and The Battle of Algiers , I suppose. In the years since its release, The Stalking Moon has not exactly been ignored. Bertrand Tavernier judged it Mulligan’s masterpiece in 50 Years of American Cinema , his critical dictionary co-written with Jean-Pierre Coursodon, and Dave Kehr tells me that it was a cult item at his campus film society. Nevertheless, it is still a movie that can be comfortably dismissed, and the same can be said for everything else by Mulligan, To Kill a Mockingbird (62) excepted. He remains a filmmaker in need of rescuing. But unlike Fuller or Ulmer, Mulligan’s problem is that he operated not at too low but too elevated a level. His choice of subject matter often aligned with official concerns and national moods—race relations in the early Sixties ( Mockingbird ), inner-city education in the late Sixties ( Up the Down Staircase , 67), Forties nostalgia in the early Seventies ( Summer of ’42 , 71), “ethnic” melodrama in the late Seventies ( Bloodbrothers , 78).

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