Frank Borzage was that rarity of rarities, an uncompromising romanticist....Many of Borzage's projects, particularly toward the end of his career, were indisputably trivial in conception, but the director's personality never faltered, and when the glorious opportunity of Moonrise presented itself, Borzage was not stale or jaded.
--Andrew Sarris
Moonrise was made at Republic Pictures, home of low-budget Westerns which occasionally did a prestigious picture, including Orson Welles's Macbeth and John Ford's The Quiet Man. Moonrise is made rather cheaply but poetically so -- a train arrives and all we see of it are smoke and shadows -- most of the film taking place on the backlot and at night; the cinematography is by John Russell, who did Welles's Macbeth the same year and later photographed Samuel Fuller's Park Row (1952) and Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).
Moonrise was shown recently on Turner Classic Movies during Black History Month because of the importance of actor Rex Ingram, who plays Mose, an isolated man who convinces Danny Hawkins (Dane Clark) not to isolate himself from society after he kills a man who mocks him about Danny's father, who killed the doctor who wouldn't come to help his wife when she was sick. Danny is a social misfit in love with Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), a schoolteacher, and the lovers regularly rendezvous in a deserted and decrepit antebellum mansion. The film is moody and accurately captures the oppressiveness of a small town but Borzage possesses neither the cynicism nor the sense of fatality that would make this a film noir, rather, Borzage's romanticism, going back to the silent days in such films as Seventh Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928), always allows for redemption.
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