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). At a time when the most adventurous figures in cinema were blurring the distinctions between foreground and background, Mulligan stuck to an older form of presentation that Kael judged to be “heavily pointed,” not without some justification. If acting in the late Sixties and early Seventies was shifting into a suppler register, you would never know it from watching Mulligan’s output—every one of his films is based on a tight linking system between actors and environment, resulting in what Fred Camper has called “the emotionalization of space.” In truth, Mulligan was sometimes too careful about keeping his emotional i’s and t’s dotted and crossed, particularly in those earlier films where the acting can get so broad that it threatens to burst out of its surroundings like a sausage from its casing. Mulligan’s background in live television drama cuts two ways. At certain moments, you can feel him pouncing on the emotional subtleties he’s divined in his material, underlining them with cuts and camera movements that, in Fear Strikes Out (57) or Love with the Proper Stranger (63), feel a little too on the nose, lit for maximum legibility. On the other hand, of all the American directors who came out of live TV, Mulligan was the only one who thought in purely visual terms—he fully embodied Astruc’s ideal of the caméra-stylo . There are lengthy passages in many of his films— Mockingbird , Up the Down Staircase , Summer of ’42 , The Other (72), The Nickel Ride (74), virtually all of The Stalking Moon and The Man in the Moon (91)—during which you can turn off the sound and follow the action without any diminution of clarity or impact. Today it looks like visual purity. In 1969, even enlightened sensibilities viewed Mulligan’s character-centered cinema as rickety, touchingly quaint, or pedantic. And maybe there was something else at work. “We were in the process of a nightmare that I didn’t understand,” Mulligan said of the late Sixties, “and that I didn’t feel anyone else understood. I mean, the riots were going on, the campuses were being burnt, the ghettos were being burnt, the marches were going on, people were being killed. It just didn’t make any sense.” Such bewilderment was not exactly novel, particularly for an ex- marine, but it left Mulligan on the square side of his generation of filmmakers. In comparison to Altman, Peckinpah, Pennebaker, and Sarafian, also born in 1925, Mulligan looks like the college professor who stayed behind to teach an empty classroom while his colleagues went out to march. And his bewilderment is reflected in his movies. All that careful emotional linking underscores what now seems like a uniquely powerful sense of home. Mulligan tends to his films the way other people tend to their houses, often displacing eroticism from people to space and light, and creating safe environments for his actors to prepare the groundwork for dramas of experience intruding upon innocence, of the unknown arriving to permanently alter the known. This drama is enacted and re-enacted again and again, from Fear Strikes Out through The Man in the Moon. In 1969, when everyone was supposed to be ravenous for experience and innocence seemed as suddenly outmoded as a crewcut, The Stalking Moon , a drama of defending home, was not destined for success. The Stalking Moon came to Mulligan and his producing partner Alan Pakula as a George Stevens hand-me-down (another guarantee of squareness), adapted by Wendell Mayes from a novel by T.V. Olsen. “I loved it because it’s kind of Hitchcock in the West,” said Mulligan, “a Western full of terror as opposed to adventure.” The description fits the film more than Olsen’s novel, which also lacks adventure but is filled with incident, a wealth of historical detail, and some overly familiar oppositions and conflicts, all jettisoned by Mulligan and Pakula and their writer, Alvin Sargent. The situation is simplicity itself. A cavalry company led by a retiring scout named Sam (Peck) and his half-breed trainee Nick (Robert Forster) raids a band of Apache women and children, and from out of the milling crowd steps a blond-haired woman of about 40 named Sarah (Eva Marie Saint) with her unnamed half-breed son (Noland Clay). She asks Peck to accompany them to the railroad station, and he grudgingly complies. Gradually, as he starts to understand that Sarah and her child are being tracked by the boy’s father, a murderous renegade named Salvaje who slaughters everyone in his path, he finds himself protecting and caring for them. He brings them back to his ranch in New Mexico, where they wait for Salvaje to find them. Gone from the novel are the boy’s sickly baby brother, the woman’s pride and loquaciousness, Sam’s desire for family and his subsequent marriage to Sarah (there is not one kiss between Peck and Saint, just an embrace that’s more protective than romantic). Most surprisingly for a movie made in 1968, also gone is Salvaje’s backstory as the sole survivor of a massacre—you would never know from watching The Stalking Moon that it is based on a novel by the same man who wrote Arrow in the Sun , adapted one year later as the violently anti-militarist Soldier Blue . And gone from this alleged slice of “Hitchcock in the West” are the tactical details of two adversaries relentlessly tracking each other through the woods. “It just didn’t work,” said Mulligan, “and a lot of that may have to do with the basic silence of the movie.” Silence and spareness: the film has about five locations and as many principal characters, two of whom (the boy and Sam’s ranch hand Ned, played by Russell Thorson) speak a combined total of ten words, while the other three keep their verbalizing to a minimum. What drove Mulligan and Pakula to shift the dramatic focus from a man looking for a home and family to a three-way exchange between a man who lets his basic human instincts override his sense of privacy, a traumatized woman and her dangerously confused son? The terror elements of The Stalking Moon are immaculately rendered, particularly a scene where Peck waits in the darkness as Salvaje, a largely unseen menace (thanks to extremely deft cutting and a little judicious undercranking), patiently advances into the house. But Mulligan invests the highest percentage of his energies elsewhere. Looking. noticing. detecting. Children studying adults. Parents studying children. Wives studying husbands. Looking for signs, cracks in the armor, shifts in temperament, changes, some necessary, some terrifying, some both. This is the heart of Mulligan’s cinema. Dave Kehr has noted Mulligan’s use of the “subjective point of view,” and it’s true that he is utterly masterful at restricting space according to a given character’s viewpoint, as in sections of Mockingbird or Jason Miller’s gun duel with Bo Hopkins in The Nickel Ride . But the subjective pull is directly connected to this drama of looking, because Mulligan’s characters are also looking at themselves. The story of a boy who is periodically compelled to run back to his father is conveyed with a minimum of words and a maximum of looks. A fairly typical scene. Peck has dropped off Saint and the boy at the railroad depot, and from the cantina where he’s having a quick drink they’re reduced to two figures in a desert landscape, primly seated as they await an uncertain future. Peck spots them out of the corner of his eye and Mulligan cuts to his POV of them through wooden crossbars. Back to Peck, who catches himself studying them and cocks his head away. He sits down on the edge of a table to drink his coffee and there they are again—a wooden beam gives them a jagged frame of their own. As Peck sits, he suddenly turns his head to look more intently. Cut to a closer angle on Peck, Saint and the boy larger still in the right side of the frame. He stands. Mulligan moves with Peck and then cuts to a close angle on his face as he lowers his head to ruminate and then turns to look, at which point we get his POV of the lowly mother and son, now the central event in the frame. We return to Peck in silent thought before he shifts his weight and Mulligan cuts to a variation on the original angle as he strides toward Saint and Clay. Thought and emotion in action. This is visual language of the greatest refinement, and it’s fairly typical of Mulligan, as are the elegantly stark beauty of the images (including a perfectly orchestrated sandstorm), the carefully patterned refrains that help to build the film dramatically—the boy’s flights away from his mother and toward his father, the tracking movements over the same terrain up and down the mountain outside the house. Just as typical are those graceful push-ins on characters at key moments, with little sneak zooms that make the approaches less glacial and more warmly responsive. Other Mulligan films are marred by unlikely and overemphatic Noo Yawk acting, either at the center ( Summer of ’42 ) or the edges ( The Other ), but that doesn’t happen here, aside from a brief interlude with an oily racist. Peck’s quiet worry, Saint’s austere, shivering disorientation, Clay’s silent enactment of sadness and puzzlement, and Forster’s balance between severity and curiosity harmonize with the gentle light and the lunar New Mexican landscape into something exceptionally beautiful and unsettling. In atmosphere and even in design, The Stalking Moon feels close to the films Pakula would make after he and Mulligan brought their partnership to an amicable end—in fact, this was their last collaboration. But I don’t think that Pakula ever made a film as emotionally taut and precise, where acting, character, setting, and style stayed in such perfect alignment. Where Pakula works toward a brooding tone in The Parallax View or the less successful Comes a Horseman , Mulligan’s film broods, along with its characters, on something specific: the emotional fate of a boy. In 1969, Vietnam was the number one candidate for cinematic allegorization, particularly in the Western. The Stalking Moon , on reflection, had something else on its mind. “We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum,” wrote Joan Didion of her 1967 spring in the Haight. “Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum.” Clay might be any child lured away from authority and parental controls by the siren song of unchecked freedom, with no consciousness of its potential traps. Where TV writers and canny opportunists would soon create an unpleasant cornucopia of hysterics and solemn bromides around this theme, Mulligan and his collaborators reduced it to its essence in the purifying light of the Western genre and made something honestly moving. Sam and Sarah and Nick aren’t guarding the boy but watching over him, giving him their attention and creating a solid foundation for him in the process. They are silently and unhesitatingly holding the vital center. Whether by instinct, temperament, or inclination, Robert Mulligan was the only American filmmaker to wade into such painfully vexing and frightfully bourgeois territory, and come out with a truly great film. The Stalking Moon. The Stalking Moon is a 1968 western filmed in Technicolor. It stars Gregory Peck and Eva Marie Saint. Robert Mulligan directed the movie. The story of The Stalking Moon was based off of the novel The Stalking Moon by T. V. Olsen. In the story, United States army soldiers gather a group of Native American women and children, and to their surprise, they find among the Native Americans a white woman and her half-Native son. This woman is named Sarah Carver, and is played by Eva Marie Saint. Sarah begs one of the soldiers named Sam Varner, played by Gregory Peck, to take her with him rather than make her wait five days for the military to send an escort. Sam takes Sarah and her son to a stage coach stop, but her son runs away that night while they are sleeping. The next day, Sarah goes out and looks for her son. Sam follows her, and meanwhile, back at the stage coach stop, the father of Sarah’s half-Native son finds the stage coach stop and vengefully kills all the passengers and everyone else waiting there. This murderer is named Salvaje. He is the father of Sarah’s son and a warrior greatly feared as a killer, even by his own people. Despite Sam's anger at Sarah for leading Salvaje to the innocent station victims, Sam invites her back to his ranch to stay with him as a cook. At the ranch, it is hard for Sam to live with Sarah and her son because neither of them are very talkative, despite Sam’s efforts. When Sam’s friend Nick who is also half-Native comes and visits one day, Sam tells Nick the story of Sarah, her son, and Salvaje, and how Salvaje killed all those people at the stage coach stop. Nick makes Sam realize that it is only a matter of time before Salvaje catches up and finds Sam, Sarah, and her son at Sam’s ranch. The Stalking Moon (1968) “The Stalking Moon” is a largely forgotten Western, owing mostly I think to arriving around the time the genre was being reexplored with a more critical eye — “The Wild Bunch,” “Little Big Man,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” But it contains some of those same questioning elements, including a subtle (maybe too subtle) examination of the relationship between an expanding America and the native peoples who were often trampled along the way. Gregory Peck, a dramatic leading man who occasionally dabbled in cowboys, had been down this path before a decade early in “The Bravados,” playing a rancher-turned-killer. Here it’s the other way around, portraying Sam Varner, an Army scout helping round up American Indians who tries to settle down but finds his old life pulling him back in. The first half is more interesting than the second, which oddly plays out almost like a slasher flick as the good guys are hunted by a seemingly unstoppable assailant. It’s a rousing bit of Western action, abetted by the novelty of an Indian antagonist who clearly outskills the white hero. But in the end, it’s just standard tension-and-release filmmaking. How the movie got there has more merit. Getting ready to muster out after 15 years with the Army, where he garnered a reputation as the best of the best, Sam is enticed to escort a white woman, Sarah Carver (Eva Marie Saint), who was kidnapped by Apaches 10 years ago when she was a girl. (This would put the character in her mid-20s at the oldest, which is a bit of a stretch for the then-44-year-old actress. Peck, at 52, is a little closer to Sam’s presumed age.) Since then she has married and produced a boy of about age 8 (Noland Clay), a “half-breed” or “breed” using the parlance of the film, who has not yet been named in the tradition of his father’s folk. After the vestiges of her tribe are captured and she is afforded the opportunity to return home to Columbus — while the Apache will assumedly be taken to a reservation — Sarah is desperate to leave right away, guilt-tripping Sam into being their escort. It’s eventually revealed that her husband is none other than Salvaje, a legendary killer feared even by his own people. Salvaje, which roughly translates as “ghost” or “he who is not here,” is intent on getting his son back, if only for pride’s sake. Sam intends to put Sarah and her boy on a train and be done with them. But after all the people at a coach station are killed while they were off chasing down the boy during a runaway attempt, he’s ready to be quit immediately. There’s a wonderful, largely wordless scene where Sam stares at the woman and her son as they wait at the lonely train station. He knows it’s the smart thing to do, but he’s also seen the looks and reaction the pair produces in white society and guesses what their future will hold. Carefully weighing matters, coupled with his own longing for stability (read: family), Sam invites them to come live with him at his ranch in New Mexico. It’s a fateful decision, yet knowing what the outcome is we suspect Sam would still make the same choice. Salvaje soon comes a-knocking, wiping out Sam’s new neighbors as well as his oldster caretaker, Ned (Russell Thorson). He’s helped for a time by Nick Tana, another “breed” Sam took under his wing a decade earlier and shaped in his image as a scout. The relationships between Sam and Nick and the boy are the film’s most compelling dynamic. Certainly it’s more worthy of note than the repressed romance that slowly builds between him and Sarah. Saint really isn’t given a whole lot to do, other than sit stoically waiting for the menfolk to do stuff as she speaks in clipped cadences of her nearly forgotten English tongue. Sam clearly regards Nick as a son, even if he’s a somewhat resentful, churlish one. In an early scene Nick throws a knife at Sam’s retreating back, clearly a demonstration of the arrival of his full manhood and commensurate independence. He feels like Sam is running away for him, and there is an unspoken hurt that the elder did not invite him to share in his new life. Maybe Nick would’ve said no, but he’s bothered by the lack of an ask. All this is barely revealed in the dialogue. A rough caress of Nick’s cheek as he dies at Salvaje’s hand is all the evidence the film provides. For his part, the boy largely remains an enigma — but it’s clear that he bears Sam even less regard. He’s rebelling at being forced away from his people to live in a white man’s world. He tries several times to escape and be reunited with his father. He steals a white man’s knife and is tempted to use it on him before Sam intervenes. Really, the best thing for all concerned would be for the boy to go back to Salvaje and for Sarah to marry Sam and produce another son. But that’s not how a mother’s love, or Western films, work. “The Stalking Moon” has impeccable credentials. It’s directed by Robert Mulligan, who made “To Kill a Mockingbird” with Peck five years earlier, with a screenplay by renowned scribe Alvin Sargent, who won two Oscars (for “Paper Moon” and “Julia”) and found a second 21st- century spurt as the script man behind three of the Spider-Man movies. This was just his second feature film writing credit after starting out in TV. Based on the novel by Theodore V. Olsen with an adaptation credit to Wendell Mayes, the filmmakers make the curious choice to depict Salvaje as little as possible. He’s only glimpsed as a shadow or distant figure until the very end, and he never speaks a single word. His showdown with Sam is shot so as to avoid showing his face or revealing his humanity. It’s basically a stuntman role. I was struck by the musical score by Fred Karlin, best known for his music for “Westworld” and its sequel. It’s more a collection of atonal sounds than melodies, with an oft-repeating discord strummed across a string instrument of some kind used for building tension. (My ear isn’t attuned enough to tell, so I’ll take a stab that it’s a mandolin, zither or dulcimer.) Is there a hidden meaning to all this? If so, we’re barely given more than a few wind-scattered tracks in the sand to decipher. My guess is the theme has something to do with Sam facing a reckoning for his transgressions as an Indian hunter. He’s reached an age where he wants to let go of that life, and finds that it has a hold on him he can’t ignore. Having raised and ultimately rejected a half-Indian child, he is given another chance at fatherhood — but has to endure a mountain of sacrifice as punishment. The lack of a real character for Salvaje indicates he’s more a remorseless force of history than a full-blooded human being, more existential threat than person. “The Stalking Moon” is well-made, but seems like a sketch for a grander, grimmer tale the filmmakers weren’t ready to tell. After the Peckinpahs and Penns of the world had their say, movies like this were destined to fade away.