Though the term wasn’t widely used back then, Moonrise is a movie about trauma. Dane Clark plays a man whose father was hanged for the crime of murder, and who’s been teased and tormented by others about it his entire life. When one of his worst childhood torturers (played by Lloyd Bridges in an early role) pushes him too far when both are adults, Clark bashes in his skull with a rock and leaves the body in the woods. This is just the beginning of Clark’s troubles. It happens that Bridges’ fiancee is Gail Russell, and Clark has always wanted her. That’s motive right there. Worse, several townspeople are quite aware that he’s always wanted her.
But maybe the body won’t ever be discovered. Fat chance. Clark spends days dreading the inevitable, then after the corpse turns up, sweats like a war criminal in the dock as the local yokel sheriff tries to solve the crime. The sheriff is one of those types that seems slow-witted but—gasp!—really isn’t. You know how it goes from that point. He drawls many homespun yet simultaneously cryptic observations that make Clark quiver in his shoes. There’s an acquaintance of Clark’s who lives in the woods, played by Rex Ingram in a rare meaty speaking role for a black actor, and he really does figure out Clark is a killer, but says nothing because he figures Clark will confess of his own accord. Hmm… maybe.
The problem is, the torment Clark has endured as both a child and adult has been over-the-top cruel. Thus traumatized across the years, he’s unable to respect any boundaries or care about any feelings save his own. For example, he gives Russell zero choice about accepting his amorous advances, and Russell allows herself to be disrespected, manhandled, and eventually bullied into a relationship. Elsewhere, eventual M*A*S*H* actor Harry Morgan plays a “deaf and dumb” local who’s mercilessly teased by a crowd. We bring it up to illustrate that, in short, this is not a movie that offers a high opinion of humanity, which makes it difficult to watch, and a little hard to believe.
But okay, Moonrise is filled with reprehensible and pitiable characters because its ultimate point is that mistreatment embeds itself in the psyche and manifests later, to exponentially more people’s detriment—i.e. it’s a losing game for a society to be cruel. Short term satisfaction is repaid with compound interest on the back end. It’s a good lesson for 2024. Not that anyone who needs to learn it would listen. We just wish Moonrise, with such a serious subtext, hadn’t been so hamhanded about the syndrome it explores. But it wasn’t bad in the end. We suspect the source novel by Theodore Strauss is more nuanced, and maybe we’ll read it and find out. Moonrise premiered today in 1948.
