I doubt that many of those who saw and loved the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) could tell you who directed it, so self-effacing was director Robert Mulligan. Mulligan was a low-key and humanistic director who, intentionally, had little sense of personal style and was always in service to the story and the screenplay. I have a certain amount of affection for Mulligan because his first film, Fear Strikes Out (1957), is not only one of the best films about baseball and the people who play it professionally -- in this case Jimmy Piersall, the eccentric outfielder for the Boston Red Sox -- but also a compassionate study of bipolar disorder and a father/son relationship.
The Stalking Moon is Mulligan's only Western and could be seen as an imagined alternate ending to John Ford's The Searchers (1956). In Mulligan's film retiring scout Gregory Peck takes home Eva Marie Saint and her son by an Apache (Nathaniel Narcisco) with whom she had been living for ten years after the Apache massacre of her family. Her son's father pursues them, killing everyone they come in contact with as Peck brings home Saint and her son, leading to a showdown at Peck's ranch, where Peck's friend (Robert Forster) and older employee (Russell Thorson) are killed before the final showdown.
The Stalking Moon is a chaste and fairly routine Western, something I mean as a compliment, considering the conflicts going on in the world when it was made. Peck is stolid throughout, while Saint has little to do or say (she has mostly forgotten the English language) except for cooking and protecting her son. The beautiful widescreen color images are courtesy of cinematographer Charles Lang, a master of black-and- white (Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, 1953) as well as color. The low-key script is by Alvin Sargent and Wendell Mayes.
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