Moonfleet (1955)

Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) Fritz Lang's only film in Cinemascope—a format he famously described as only good for shooting "snakes and funerals" (well, he says it in Contempt, anyway!). 

 

"Moonfleet" was a popular novel published in 1898 and was considered a classic of literature—on a par with Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island"—but not so much in the U.S. Producer John Houseman, working at M-G-M, maybe influenced by the success of Disney's 1950 version of Stevenson's classic, wedged in Moonfleet between prestige pictures, but on a limited budget—no ocean scenes, no tall ships, no cluttered sword-riots, no piratey aspects that required crowds and location work. Lang, who actually preferred studio work over the capricious lighting of location scenes, was hired two weeks before shooting started and hadn't worked at M-G-M since his first film in America, the 1936 production of Fury. The script had aspects of the novel, but didn't follow it too closely, taking the novel's hero and making him a child, as opposed to the young man of the novel, who depends on an older mercenary smuggler to pursue his quest of a legendary diamond belonging to the pirate Blackbeard.

That's one way to use the Cinemascope frame.

 

Well, it's "Redbeard" in the movie (public domain issues?). Young John Mohune (Jon Whiteley) is sent by his dying mother to the town of Moonfleet, site of the original Mohune estate, to seek out a man with whom she had a past, Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Exhausted by his travel, young John wakes up in a tavern surrounded by ruffians—including Dan Seymour and Jack Elam—who search him and find a letter from the boy's mother, appointing Fox as John's guardian. It's convenient because Fox just happens to be the man now occupying the Mohune manse.

It's inconvenient because, when Fox hears this, he wants nothing to do with the boy, being a man of the world and all. But, he does acknowledge knowing the mother, being fond of her, and that he and the boy may have more in common than Fox will acknowledge—like the boy's nightmares of being attacked by dogs echoing the scars on Fox's back from such an attack while he was running from the Mohune house so many years ago. Probably as many years as the boy's been alive, but the film skirts this issue, while hinting that it's probably true. Still, he plans to have the boy sent packing in the morning, while he continues on to Moonfleet.

 

He, of course, hasn't reckoned with the boy being a Mohune, and a tenacious one at that. The boy manages to make his escape and, with the help of some locals, make his way back to his family's estate, where he finds Fox in mid-debauch, hosting several drunken lords, complete with entertainment by a gypsy dancer (Liliane Montevecchi). Young John insists he won't be sent away this time and that he intends to stay with Fox as per his mother's wishes. Fox is impressed by the boy, but secretly intends to send him away to the colonies on the next boat. When Fox's mistress Mrs. Minton (Viveca Lindfors) accuses Fox of his actions towards John as being proof of his continuing love for the boy's mother, he tells her that, in that case, she can leave on the same boat with him.

The next day, John attends church services, where he is informed—via a fiery sermon about superstition—that the villagers fear that the spirit of the pirate Red Beard, who was a Mohune, is haunting the church graveyard looking for the diamond that made him renounce his military career and become a pirate. While walking the grounds that night, John falls into an open grave that leads to the catacombs under the church full of broken caskets and the bones of the departed. But Fox's pirates come down there, too, looking for potential riches, and the boy finds a locket while hiding away from sight.

When rescued from the catacombs by Fox, his band is ready to slit the boy's throat for anything the kid might have found, and when Fox defends the boy, the pirates—being pirates—turn against him. This puts Fox in a difficult position—he is being challenged by his own band at the same time he's trying to finagle a deal with the duplicitous magistrate Lord Ashwood (venomed by George Sanders, as only George Sanders can) and his equally devious wife (played by the ever-delightful Joan Greenwood in her first American role).

That locket John has snatched will contain  a secret that must be decoded and from there, Fox and friend must evade his former co-conspirators, as well as the Ashwoods, and the authorities to find the diamond and extricate it from its hiding place smack-dab in the middle of a military prison, even while they're considered wanted fugitives. This gives plenty of opportunity for composer Miklós Rózsa to create bustling tension music (which sounds like it's a dress rehearsal for his score for Ben-Hur), while the duo put themselves directly in harms way to achieve their goals.

It's not the novel—which shares the diamond and the locket and the clues, and that's about it—but Lang makes the most out of the material scraped from the book to accommodate Granger's starring persona, while directing it from the vantage of a child's point of view, and enveloping it in a child's nightmare of Gothic structures and macabre situations, with a mentor who is as questionable a father-figure as one could encounter (outside of Dickens). Maybe that's why it never found an audience—too "mature" for kids, too cynical for adults, and not "family-friendly"—which led Houseman to write: "All too often, in those days, I felt that the director was receiving credit for the producer's work. This time (Lang) was taking the blame for the producer's errors." Hard to believe that—with all of his fanciful German work, Moonfleet was the most expensive film, Lang ever worked on.

The Exorcist III

The Exorcist III (aka Legion) (William Peter Blatty, 1990) An odd little experiment in horror, more compelling than William Friedkin's chest-thumping original,* with more humor—Blatty had, previously in his career, written some quite funny scripts for Blake Edwards in the 1960's—and some genuinely unnerving moments that may not make one jump out of one's seat (well, one thing will), but will certainly creep one out.

It begins with a little bit of catch-up and two fine actors who did not appear as these characters in the original Exorcist—but probably should have. Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) is meeting up with old friend Father Dyer (Ed Flanders). It has been 15 years since the events of the original Exorcist, and the two men have had a steady friendship with shared lunches and grousing about their work-lives—Scott and Flanders are so good that they milk laughs out of lines that are as dry as a dessicated bone. When we see them, they're both trying to cheer each other up, remembering their mutual friend, Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller) on the anniversary of his death, sacrificing himself in the act of an exorcism. 

It's an off-kilter, unnerving way to start a horror movie, a little bit like starting a corporate speech by laying off your employees with a joke. And that odd humor occurs often, with stray one-liners and the bizarre visual touch, sometimes lurched into the foreground, sometimes folded into the cracks of a frame. It walks arm and arm with Blatty's atmospherics of weighted...pauses in conversations, shifting shadows, slight zephyrs of wind, and the occasional breath of laughter. Odd and unnerving are the two words that best describe The Exorcist III.

Kinderman is investigating a bizarre series of murders that have ties to the exorcism of Regan McNeil, and that bear the un-publicized M.O. of "The Gemini Killer," who had been executed 15 years before. As if that wasn't bizarre enough, the murderer leaves behind a different set of finger-prints at each murder scene. There is more than one killer with secret knowledge, and the investigation soon zeroes in on Georgetown's Catholic hospital, where in the bowels of the psych ward sits a chained amnesiac, named "Patient X," found wandering aimlessly 15 years before. When Kinderman's investigation takes him to this room, he finds the form of his friend, Fr. Damian Karras.

What is Karras doing there, and why? Kinderman soon finds that he's not just talking to Karras, but also the form the "Gemini," who to serve his "patron" exacted revenge on Karras by taking over his body and, now, with consciousness regained, the "Gemini" prowls the hospital looking for new hosts and new victims. 

It sounds absurd, utterly bonkers when relaying it in outline, but one cannot deny how effectively all this plays on the screen. What makes the film work is Blatty's assured direction, his devilish (if you will) humor and the total commitment of all the actors to the film and grounding it in some filmic reality. If you're going to believe in the spirit-world (as The Exorcist certainly does), you've got to wonder what happens when even a bound devil takes the gloves off and takes advantage of a truly evil spirit. Bonkers, yes, but not the way Blatty plays it.

The film was compromised somewhat by the studio's insistence that there be an actual exorcism (by Nicol Williamson's cameo priest), thereby muddling up the finale, but the film up to then is disquieting and in a far less bluntly hammering way than Friedkin's head-spinning original. Blatty's direction makes you not trust the film, and to be wary of what awaits on the other side of every edit he makes (and just when you think you have his pattern figured out, he will do something different).

He's not afraid to harness Scott's penchant for untethered behavior in his performances, but the kudo's for the best performance of the film belong to Brad Dourif. Quick as mercury, quirky as Hell, his performance as "Patient X" (a role shared by Miller and the voice of Colleen Dewhurst, the former Mrs. Scott), is a tour de force played mostly to the camera in long unbroken takes, with the odd touch of a tear that slides down the left side of his face, and the electronic manipulation of his voice to drop it into the lower depths. The movie starts to fall apart once Dourif departs (and when the studio-influence starts), but for most of its running time, it manages to rise above the other films in the series.

* And miles ahead of John Boorman's "sexy beast" movie, the deservedly reviled spawn of satan: The Exorcist II: The Heretic.