Moontide

Bobo works on the docks. He wakes from a long binge with no memory of the night, and that same night a man was killed. He does not know whether he did it. Then he pulls Anna out of the water when she tries to drown herself, and the two begin to build a life. Tiny, an old friend, knows what happened and turns it into a hold over him. Archie Mayo directs. Jean Gabin plays Bobo, Ida Lupino plays Anna and Thomas Mitchell plays Tiny. The screenplay is by John O'Hara. This is Gabin's first American film. He went to Hollywood after the occupation of France and the studio sold him on the fatalist dockside figure of his French films; the American career did not take, and he returned after the war. Fritz Lang began the production, shot a few scenes and left, and the film went to Mayo. A dream montage was prepared for the drinking sequence, and its design was given to Salvador Dalí. The visual style tries to rebuild French poetic realism inside an American studio: fog, a jetty, night and a man with nowhere to go. Who it is for: anyone curious about Gabin and about the trace of prewar French style in Hollywood. Who it is not for: the narrative is weak, the second half falls into melodrama, and Gabin is wrestling with English.