The Moonlighter

With Barbara Stanwyck being TCM's Star of the Month and my having multiple of her films on my DVR that I hadn't gotten around to watching yet, it should come as no surprise that I'm highlighting a couple of them over the course of the month as they show up on TCM. This time, it will be The Moonlighter, which TCM has tomorrow (March 27) at 8:30 AM.

The Moonlighter in the title of the movie refers to a man who works at night, specifically rustling cattle so that nobody can get a good enough look at his face while he's doing it. That man is Wes Anderson (Fred MacMurray), a man who's stealing cattle around the turn of the century, just at the time when the horseless carriage started to show up (which as you can guess is a plot point later in the movie). But as the movie opens, he's been caught by a sheriff in some town and is being brought in to jail. This is done under cover of anonymity, as the sheriff knows that the locals will try to break in to the jail and lynch Wes for his crimes.

In another bit of foreshadowing, the sheriff and #1 deputy make a big deal about putting Wes in cell #3, the first time in a western I've seen the cells numbered like this. Then another prisoner is brought in and makes comments about the dirty state of the cells. So the sheriff lets this new prisoner use a broom to sweep out the cells, putting Wes in a different cell until that job is done. Having done all that, the sheriff and deputy go out for a quick bite to eat, leaving behind an older deputy who's clearly not up to the task of stopping the braying mob from breaking in.

Sure enough, said mob does so, and then goes to the restaurant when the deputy takes the keys there. The sheriff only tells the mob after they beat him that Wes is in cell #3, which we of course know is no longer the truth. But the guy in #3 looks vaguely like Wes, down to the beard that MacMurray is surprisingly sporting for plot reasons (he can disguise himself by shaving it off). The mob leaves the keys close enough to where Wes can get them from his cell, so he takes the opportunity to escape. Seeing the lynching, he decides to gain revenge on the people who did this to him, even if it wasn't him.

A week or so later, an emissary from Wes' family shows up to claim the body. That woman is Rela (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been Wes' girlfriend until he left five years back to try to make enough money to be able to support her so she'd marry him, only to find he had to resort to illicit means that for Rela are a deal-breaker. The undertaker tells Rela that another family member already paid for the burial and, in a flashback, we learn that it was Wes using just his initials as if that would fool the townsfolk.

Wes, during his revenge tour, eventually gets himself shot in the shoulder and, having nowhere else to go, decides to go home to his mother and kid brother Tom (William Ching). Tom is working at a bank but, more importantly, decided to start putting the moves on Rela himself since Wes is no longer in Rela's plans. And if Tom can earn enough money.... But he panics one day when a man comes in to the bank looking like a sheriff's deputy and asking about Tom and Wes. For the mistakes he makes handling money, Tom gets himself furloughed. Worse, it turns out the man was only an old friend of Wes' named Cole Gardner (Ward Bond). Cole has plans for "one last heist" that will leave everybody financially set. Tom overhears it, and thinks this is how he can get enough money to marry Rela.

But the plan goes wrong, Tom gets shot, and a posse is sent out to look for Wes and Cole. Meanwhile, as with lots of heist movies, the survivors start arguing with one another about the split. Rela is the only one who knows where Wes' old hideout might be, so she approaches the sheriff in asks to be deputized, going solo to find Wes.

The Moonlighter is a modest little western, and one that doesn't really do much special, with one exception. That exception is that somebody came up with the idea to film this in 3-D, this being early 1953 when 3-D was one of the gimmicks to get people to leave the small screens at home and come back in to the movie theaters. There's not much the 3-D is used for, apart from the opening credits and then some waterfall shots near the end. MacMurray and Stanwyck are professional here, although you get the feeling that they're just taking a paycheck since they're not doing anything that stretches their talents.

I don't think anybody involved with The Moonlighter had anything to be embarrassed about in having this be part of their filmography. But I also don't think anybody will think of it near the top of the lists of great movies they made.