Moonrise (Charles K. Feldman Productions, Marshall Grant Productions, Republic, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, June 26) I watched the Washington Week telecast and then a quite good if flawed film on Turner Classic Movies: Moonrise, a 1948 film directed by Frank Borzage for Republic Pictures and an unusual combination of romantic melodrama and film noir. The script was written by Charles F. Haas based on a novel, also called Moonrise, by Theodore Strauss, and I was watching it on an unusual showing for which TCM has given Eddie Muller, the usual host of their “Noir Alley” showings on Saturdays, a chance to do his typical film noir thing on Fridays in summer as well with double bills. (Before Moonrise they showed an Anthony Mann film called Raw Deal, which I’ve written about before on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/07/raw-deal-reliance-pictures-eagle-lion.html.) Moonrise begins with an artfully composed shot of a man being hanged for murder; we soon learn that the killer/victim is the father of Danny Hawkins (Stephen Peck at seven, Johnny Calkins at 13, and Dane Clark as an adult). We later learn that Danny’s dad killed for at least morally understandable reasons: his wife (Danny’s mother) had just died after the local doctor had refused to come see her and instead just gave her some pills and told her husband she’d get better on her own. Danny’s dad blamed the doctor for his wife’s death and killed him in revenge, and with both parents gone Danny was raised by his Aunt Jessie (Selena Royle). He grew up the victim of constant bullying, particularly by Jerry Sykes (Tommy Ivo at seven, Michael Dill at 13, and Lloyd Bridges as an adult), son of local banker J. B. Sykes (Harry V. Cheshire). Jerry so continually taunts Danny about being the son of a man who was hanged for murder that when they finally confront each other at a dance (there’s some confusion as to where Moonrise takes place: we see an exterior shot of a railway station that identifies the locale as New Jersey but later we’re told it’s Virginia, and certainly the palmetto country and the terrible Southern accents affected by most of the actors, as well as the ruined old plantation house and the African-American caretaker that lives there that figure prominently in the later action, point towards the South), Jerry attacks Danny with a rock, Danny grabs the rock from him, and Danny ultimately kills Jerry with it. The Wikipedia plot summary on Moonrise indicates that Danny’s crime was justifiable self-defense, but the film itself is considerably less clear about that.

Fleeing the scene, Danny leaves behind his Swiss army knife hanging from a tree – Borzage and his cinematographer, John L. Russell (a favorite of major directors shooting films on limited budgets; he also shot Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) give us some long, portentous close-ups of the knife hanging from the tree branch where it snagged after Danny left the scene. Danny also has a crush on Jerry’s girlfriend, local schoolteacher Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), and starts dating her after Jerry’s disappearance despite her fear that being seen going out with someone else so soon after her relationship with Jerry ended will cost her her job as a teacher. Danny and Gilly are involved in an auto accident with two other teenagers coming home from the dance, during a break from which Danny killed Jerry, caused by Danny driving drunk and losing control of the car. While in the wreckage Danny and Gilly kiss each other passionately without bothering to check on the status of the other two passengers. Danny and Gilly start dating, but only in out-of-the-way places like that old abandoned plantation house where the African-American caretaker Mose (Rex Ingram, the fascinating actor who was the first person to play both God and the Devil on screen: God in The Green Pastures and the Devil in Cabin in the Sky) lives. Mose is an old friend of Danny’s and lets them have the run of the place; he also sings them a blues song called “Lonesome” (written by the film’s overall composer, William Lava, to a lyric by Theodore Strauss, author of the novel on which Moonrise was based) whose references to a murderer being arrested, convicted, and hanged cut a bit too close to Danny’s own past for his comfort. (Rex Ingram turns out to have had a nice singing voice – assuming it’s his own, and I’m inclined to think it is.) Along the way Danny is involved in a raccoon hunt in which his job is to climb a tree and shake the targeted raccoon loose from the tree so the others in the party can shoot it. While on the hunt the dogs that are being used to track the game go crazy, and eventually the dogs lead the hunters to the body of Jerry Sykes. The dogs had been “planted” earlier in the film when Mose recalled an incident in his previous career as a railroad brakeman, where he gave his coat to a man riding the rods and later he turned out to be an escaped criminal who was hunted down by law enforcement with a pack of dogs. “It’s right to use dogs to hunt coons, not to hunt people,” Mose says.

The local sheriff, Clem Otis (Allyn Joslyn), at first suspects Ken Williams (David Street), the bandleader at the dance (who’d sung the film’s title song, composed by William Lava to lyrics by Harry Tobias, earlier at the dance), of Jerry’s murder, but eventually he decides Danny is the killer, at least in part because Danny’s knife was found in the swamp country by Billy Scripture (Harry Morgan), a deaf-mute whom Danny had previously defended but whom he attacks and beats within an inch of his life trying to find out where Scripture is hiding his knife. (I must acknowledge that, since he was playing a man who couldn’t speak, I didn’t recognize Harry Morgan. Usually I know him from his distinctive voice.) Ultimately Sheriff Otis and his deputies track Danny to the swamp country, where he’s gone to visit his surviving grandmother (Ethel Barrymore, who got third billing after Clark and Russell even though she’s only in one scene towards the end). I was sure this would end much the way director Joseph H. Lewis ended his 1949 film noir masterpiece Gun Crazy the following year, with the central anti-hero brought down by his boyhood friend turned sheriff. Instead Gilly Johnson meets up with him before the shootout starts and persuades him to give himself up, saying that if he can convince the authorities he killed Jerry in self-defense he’ll be let off easily and have a chance at a normal life. Eddie Muller cited Moonrise as an example of the rarely seen sub-genre “redemptive noir,” in which the protagonist is brought back from the noir world and morally redeems him- or herself. Frankly, I can think of at least two better “redemptive noirs,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) and Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951) – and Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) might also have qualified if the Production Code Administration had allowed Warner Bros. to retain the ending of W. R. Burnett’s source novel, in which former gangster Roy Earle (played by Humphrey Bogart in the film) is allowed to live and find redemption.

To me the ending of Moonrise is a cheat that undercuts the visual and emotional power of the rest of the movie. The whole film is a clash between Borzage the director of romantic melodramas (at which he’d excelled since his days at Fox in the late silent era doing films like Seventh Heaven and Street Angel) and Borzage the would-be noir director, and with that phony ending romance won out over noir. Moonrise could have been a much more interesting film if it had exploited the philosophical question underlying the plot: will a man who as a boy is told throughout his life that he is evil become evil and do evil things when he grows up? It’s the question that haunted Gregory Maguire, author of the 1995 book Wicked – his reworking of The Wizard of Oz. Maguire said he was inspired to write Wicked by one of the most brutal and senseless crimes in British history, the kidnapping, torture, and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Maguire explained, “If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize? How much of that would you say, all right, go ahead, I’ll be everything that you call me because I have no capacity to change your minds anyway so why bother. By whose standards should I live?” Moonrise could have been a much more interesting film if writer Haas could have explored that theme, and also if the central character of Danny Hawkins had been better cast. Originally Moonrise was supposed to be first a Paramount and then an independent production to be directed by William Wellman with John Garfield as star. Alas, that version fell through and it ended up at Republic, which had signed Borzage to a three-film contract of which this was the third and last film. (The others were I’ll Always Love You, a big tear-jerker about an unfulfilled classical pianist and the farm boy she left back home, and That’s My Man, in which, according to imdb.com, “A poor young man is finally able to achieve his dream of running a horse at the track, but when he starts becoming successful, he begins to lose sight of what mattered to him before.”) Boy star Lon McCallister had tried out for the role of Danny, having already done a bit of Southern-fried Gothic noir in The Red House a year earlier, but it went to Clark instead. Frankly, I thought that during the early scene in which Danny killed Jerry, the roles should have been reversed and Lloyd Bridges, not the most subtle actor of all times either but a damned sight better and more charismatic than Clark, should have survived!