Moontide (1942)

Directed by Archie Mayo

Debra and I have just saw our Film of the Week for the first time a few days ago, quite an unusual film, whose star, the highly acclaimed French actor Jean Gabin, was once aptly described as a Charles Boyer from the wrong side of the railroad tracks. Here he plays a dock worker and boat repairman and bait seller named Bobo, a bit of a roustabout, hot-tempered at times, and by no means a man you’d want to introduce to your daughter. Yet appearances deceive. His life changes when he saves a young woman, Anna (a very young and pretty Ida Lupino) who is walking fully clothed straight out into the sea — and he must swim with all his might to do it. But he has a “friend,” actually a blackmailing villain, Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), who wants him to leave southern California and Anna behind, to go with him to San Francisco and Portland, where supposedly some good work is waiting for them. Actually, what Tiny wants is that no one should have any leverage against his ability to get Bobo to do his will — and if ever Tiny had any knowledge to blackmail Bobo with, after the beginning of this film he has all the more. That’s because a surly barfly is found strangled and Bobo, so drunk he cannot remember anything he did the night before, cannot be certain that he did not do it.

The Word of the Week was fruit, and there I mentioned that in Italian, the related verb frugare implies rummaging around and otherwise trying to squeeze every drop of advantage out of something — or someone. Tiny is trying to do that to Bobo — and by the way, if you don’t think Thomas Mitchell is an actor of immense range, compare his friendly and bumbling Uncle Billy from It's a Wonderful Life with his atheist doctor in The Keys of the Kingdom, intelligent and self-sacrificing, with the brute he plays here. Bobo hasn’t lived to make any real life for himself, but that changes when he saves Anna, a woman whose profession, “working in a hash-house,” as Tiny says, insinuating the worst, has left her not wanting to live. There’s no sentimentality about the change. Suddenly Bobo decides that, just as he had spent so many years not wanting any home, so now it might be the time to want just that. He’s helped to come to this conclusion by another drifter, a philosophical friend with the name Nutsy (Claude Rains). Nutsy doesn’t know who committed the murder, either, but instead of using a piece of apparent evidence that falls his way — the murdered man’s hat — to get the goods out of Bobo, he burns it, without even telling Bobo that such a thing ever existed.

Anna falls for this mysterious and craggily handsome seadog, and it seems that she’s willing to be his “wife” without benefit of clergy, but Bobo says that since it’s a wife they’re talking about, they’re going to do everything right, with a minister and everything; and he sleeps in a sack outside his dockside hovel, while she sleeps on the only bed inside. It would be too easy to say that this is just the Hays Code at work, but it’s really strikes to the heart of this strange and appealing Frenchman. Wherever he goes, his honesty and his robust love of life has an effect on other people. Not least among them is a doctor (Jerome Cowan) who is separated from his wife and is spending his time in San Pablo, boating with a young woman, and, fortunately for him, he’s not very good at keeping his engine in repair, and that puts him in some regular contact with Bobo. At first you’ll think that this character is just an afterthought, but he too is brought into the human influence of the good, though troubled, man, and he plays an important double part in the film’s climax.

There sure was a lot of brains in this cast. Ida Lupino, like Susan Hayward, was one of the most intelligent actresses America produced, and it shows here; you won’t be surprised that she would go on to direct movies on her own. Thomas Mitchell was a director and a playwright on the side, when he wasn’t being old O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. As for Claude Rains, how that man never won an Oscar, I have no idea; you’ve got to be on the top of your game to stay in the same scene with him, in such a film as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for instance. But the real revelation for us was the performance of Jean Gabin. As I said, he was a titan in French film, and you can see it in his swagger and, more, in a face that needs only to be what it is to express sadness, determination, or love. The man was quite a patriot, too, fighting alongside De Gaulle in the French resistance. Let’s just say that we intend to see more of Jean Gabin at Word and Song.

---