The Cinematheque

“Melancholy and mysterious … [Borzage’s] doom-laden romanticism pervades the movie’s visual style as well as its drama.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Frank Borzage, anointed Best Director at the very first Academy Awards in 1929, capstoned his distinguished career with Moonrise, an oneiric adaptation of Theodore Strauss’s serialized novel about an anguished psyche driven to violence. Cursed by the fate of his father, who was hanged on the charge of murder, Danny (Dane Clark) has grown up bullied and outcast in his small, Appalachian town. Now in adulthood, a cruel destiny lies in wait when, in an act of self-defence and unbridled fury, Danny kills his longtime tormentor. Salvation is sought in the love of the dead man’s fiancée (Gail Russell), and an almost mythical return to his roots in the Virginia swamplands. Displaying a masterful marriage of lush noir photography (shot by Psycho​’s John L. Russell) and macabre themes with the emotional grandeur of Hollywood melodrama, Borzage’s impressionistic parable of sin and redemption is a twilight triumph for the Golden Age director.

“Perhaps Borzage’s greatest film … The perfect answer to those critics who have derided Borzage as a ​‘mere’ romantic.”

Phil Hardy, Time Out

“Both a summation of the director’s thematic concerns and a visually stunning marriage of pictorial lyricism with noir sensibilities … It stands out from any other American film made in the 1940s.”

Jeff Stafford, TCM