Moontide

For Zuma. I hope and wish that everything is going well for you.

This was a picture that Fritz Lang began shooting in 1942 and Archie Mayo finished. It is the first film Jean Gabin made in the United States, and also a production by Mark Hellinger — a significant figure in the Hollywood of the 1940s who championed what were called social subjects and a more realistic treatment of them.

Here the protagonists — both Gabin and Thomas Mitchell — are people who live by their hands: hard, badly paid work as a docker or a night watchman, people with no education, enormous hearts, and a certain fondness for alcohol.

And into this world of rough men who go by the names of Bobo, Tiny, and Pop, gentleness arrives in the form of the desperate girl — the superb Ida Lupino, Anna in the fiction.

The film’s general tone sits close to the poetic realism of French cinema from the second half of the 1930s: highly precise and believable details about the characters’ habits are layered alongside a heavily stylized visual treatment that leans toward expressionism, making great use of shadows and fog. The chase sequence between Mitchell and Gabin on the dock is a model example of exactly what I mean. Whatever the credit is due, Moontide holds up magnificently today — like a UFO from an unknown planet: luminous and comforting. Although the action is never pinned to a specific year, it is evident we are deep in the Great Depression: the characters speak of their erratic search for work in Portland and San Francisco; wages run at one, two, three, four dollars a day supplemented by alcohol; and everywhere there are those men without fortune, a kind of solidarity or dependency that also corresponds to a tradition of social movements.

Let it be said in conclusion that the film is very, very well written, and that it includes a wedding reception scene built with a very particular rhythm.

THIS FILM IS MY WEAKNESS.

CARLOS