Not that there's much moonlight....

I watch a lot of movies that are available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive in part because most of what I record is off of TCM, and in part because I make it a point to look up the movies I haven't blogged about that have been released by the Warner Archive in order that I can blog about them. With that in mind, the latest Warner Archive selection is The Moonlighter.

Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd are nowhere to be found, as this is an early 1950s western. Fred MacMurray plays Wes Anderson, a man who has just been put in jail for "moonlighting", or rustling cattle under cover of darkness. Of course, this is a serious offense in those old westerns, and he's probably going to get a substantial punishment. But the townsfolk, led by Alex Prince (Morris Ankrum), don't want to wait for legal justice to take its course, so they plan to bust Wes out of jail in order to lynch him.

There's one problem however, which is that they don't know what Wes looks like, since there's no photograph on a wanted poster for them to consult. All they know is which jail cell he's in. And this is where the big problem comes. When the jail cells were being cleaned, Wes got moved into a different cell, and another man was put in the one he had been in. So when they lynch mob comes, they get the wrong guy! But everybody just natuarlly assumes Wes was killed.

Some time after the lynching, a woman named Rela (Barbara Stanwyck) shows up in town asking about Wes. Upon learning that he was killed, she pays for his funeral and breathes a sigh of relief. She had been in love with Wes in the past, but things grew problematic what with Wes' life of crime. She fell in love with another man, and is now free to marry him.

Of course, we know that Wes is still alive. He, having seen the lynch mob kill an innocent man, decides that he's going to exact his own form of vengeance on the mob, trying to kill them one by one. This isn't easy, and in one of the attempts to kill people in the mob he gets shot himself. So he beats a hasty escape and decides that he'll go back to his old home.

There, Wes will meet his kid brother Tom (William Ching), and Tom's girlfriend... who just happens to be Rela. Oh dear. As with Love Me Tender, the reappearance of a man who was thought dead but isn't causes all sorts of problems.

Tom has been working at the bank in town, but gets fired. Around the same time, one of Wes' old friends, Cole Gardner (Ward Bond) shows up. Cole wasn't part of the lynch mob, and has a new job in mind for himself and Wes: rob the bank in this town. Wes understandably doesn't want Tom in on this at all, but Tom, having been fired, wants his own revenge, so he's anxious to be let in on the bank robbery.

The Moonlighter, like Love Me Tender, has an interesting premise. And with two headliners like Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, you'd think you'd get a really good little movie out of it. Yet somewhere, The Moonlighter loses its way. Nothing really works as well as it should, and at just under 80 minutes it all feels quite rushed, with an ending that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but seems to satisfy the Production Code.

I certainly wouldn't use The Moonlighter to introduce people to either Fred MacMurray or Barbara Stanwyck. But for people who are already movie buffs and looking for something new to them, why not give The Moonlighter a try and judge for yourself.