One of two American made films that Jean Gabin did in Hollywood while in exile from his beloved France is this item Moontide. It's not anywhere in the class of The Grand Illusion, Pepe LeMoko, or La Bete Humaine in fact it goes over into melodrama. Still it's a good showcase for his talent and appeal.Gabin is a happy go lucky sailor who is beached with his pal Thomas Mitchell in the small coast town of San Pablo in California. He's a nasty drunk however who can be provoked to violence and has been. Another waterfront denizen Arthur Aylesworth is killed and Gabin is tormented by the fact that he was on one big bender the night of the homicide and it could be him.But that doesn't stop him from saving the life of Ida Lupino who tries to drown herself because of her own relationship problems. These two fall for each other and they plan to settle in San Pablo and marry. And of course there's no room for Mitchell in the new setup.Which doesn't please Mitchell at all. He's basically a leech who's attached himself to Gabin and he doesn't want to give up his meal ticket. Claude Rains who is a droll waterfront philosopher calls him a pilot fish which is a fish that hangs around sharks and lives off the scraps they leave. Time for Mitchell to find another shark.Given that this is the Code era and that a major studio 20th Century Fox produced Moontide the rather obvious homosexual attachment of Mitchell to Gabin is hard to miss. Perhaps that is something that the original director Fritz Lang might have explored a bit more. In fact the film could have been a classic had Lang stayed with it.Still the cast acquit themselves well in Moontide and a film with Jean Gabin is always something special.

Moontide (1942)What a surprise, and with some well known actors in little known roles. And one little known actor in the U.S., the great French star Jean Gabin. All put together in an elegant, fast, and sympathetic way.The story is rather sweet, a love story between two unlikely loners, the charming and volatile hard drinking Bobo, played by Gabin, and the young and troubled Anna, played by Ida Lupino. Each of their pasts looms and interferes in the romance, mainly through the maliciousness of Bobo's old friend, another violent man played by Thomas Mitchell. And then there is the incomparable Claude Rains (you won't recognize him in the first scenes with his beard), who plays a truly good friend. All of this takes place in a little fishing shack at a big stone breakwater on the California Coast somewhere, and most of it takes place at night. Archie Mayo, who made a lot of really good films and few if any masterpieces ("Petrified Forest" is his most famous, from 1936), really does show mastery of storytelling here. And with cinematography by Charles Clarke good enough to get an Oscar nomination (with some help by the more famous Lucien Ballard), you can see why this is better than most. Fritz Lang is shown as a co-director behind the scenes, and you get suspicious that the visual strength of all this is partly his doing. But it is the story itself that might be the achilles heel here--it progresses with some twists that are suggested in the first few minutes, and that don't turn and surprise us later. The end is the end you expect, all neatly packaged.Not that you don't mind so much--the leading characters are, if nothing else, very likable. But along those same lines, I think every scene is filmed by-the-book. Very likable, and competent, and rather beautiful all along, but lacking the edges of uncertainty, of emotional depths you would expect from these kinds of characters, even of drama in the few scenes of violence. "Moontide," with its poetic title, insists somehow that it is a just a performance and an entertainment, a light romance, even though it's just an inch from tipping into something much bigger.

Here we have the 28 year-old Ida Lupino, looking more like 19 or 20, and already the veteran of more than thirty films, being a frail, charming, and vulnerable waif. She is thoroughly convincing, and we would all like to take her in and look after her. This duty falls to the gruff Jean Gabin, a hard-drinking waterfront drifter from port to port, who has at some point arrived in the States from France. In fact, Gabin in real life had fled the Nazi Occupation and this was one of two American films which he made in exile. The film was supposed to be directed by Fritz Lang, who would have made it a moodier and darker piece. However, he was replaced by the more cheerful Archie Mayo, so we get a film whose real value is not as cinema but as encounter between Lupino and Gabin. That keeps us watching. Claude Rains gives bemused support as a California waterfront bum (hardly his usual type of role!) and Thomas Mitchell is an unctuous, scheming villain who has conned Gabin into thinking he has 'something on him'. The film is rather sinister, and in many ways pointless. If it weren't for Lupino and Gabin being so fascinating, nobody would bother to watch this movie, as it falls between many stools. But Lupino is so entrancing in this role, that presumably no one really cares about the story anyway. And listening to Jean Gabin speak heavily accented English in California is so extraordinary that one wants to watch that too. Who gives a damn about the film, we've got Lupino and Gabin, and that's all that matters. They could read the telephone directory as far as I am concerned, and I would still watch.

***SPOILER*** You've got to hand it to BoBo the Sailorman , Jean Gabin, he knows what he wants and goes all out to get it no matter what the dangers and consequence's are. BoBo's heavy drinking and non-stop womanizing would have lead to a situation that would have gotten him locked up behind bars or in an early grave. That is until that fateful evening when BoBo ran into Anna, Ida Lupino, on he beach outside of San Pablo. Young and pretty Anna tired to pull of a "Star is Born" like suicide walk into the Pacific Ocean where a gallant and, for once, sober BoBo saved her life. Taking Anna into his docked fishing boat, as well as home, Bobo soon falls for the sweet and confused woman after she cooked him up eggs easy side up, just the way he likes them.More or less a rootless and solitary traveling man BoBo gets hooked on Anna and decides to settle down and marry her. It's then when things get a bit strained with BoBo's friend Tiny, Thomas Mitchell, feeling that Anna is breaking up a beautiful friendship, him & BoBo, and decides to put the screws on both BoBo and his future bride.Tiny had planned to travel with BoBo upstate from the little dinky sea-town of San Pablo to bigger and better things in beautiful and scenic San Francisco. With Anna coming on the scene Tiny is now forced to travel, with no money for transportation, upstate alone and in his mind this just is not to happen as long as he can help it. It turns out that during his last drunken episode BoBo lost his memory in what he did the last 12 or so hours. It was during that lost time in BoBo's life a friend of his Old Pop Kelly, Arthur Aylesworth, was found strangled to death. It also turned out that Pop's sailor cap was found by BoBo's and Tiny's friend Nutsy, Clude Rains, in BoBo's boat!Tiny knowing how both crazy and powerful BoBo is when he's on the sauce, he once killed a man in self-defense while being dead drunk, is sure that BoBo did Old Pop Kelly in. With that knowledge at his disposal Tiny plans to blackmail BoBo into dropping his future bride Anna and go off to the city by the bay with him as his life-long gofer and parasite; Tiny has been living off BoBo's earning as a sailor and longshoreman for some ten years.One thing that soon comes out about this strange relationship, Tiny & BoBo, is that Bobo isn't the only one of the hard-drinking pair who has a habit of drinking himself into never-never land. Tiny also can put it away by the bottle, not just the shot-glass, an is a bit less restrained then BoBo is when he's out cold from an all night drinking session.**SPOILER ALERT***In fact where exactly was Tiny when Pop Kelly was strangled to death? That's the question that Anna asked a barley on his feet, from drinking, Tiny as he crashed into her and BoBo's boat on their wedding night! Bobo, an excellent mechanic, being away at the time fixing his friend Dr. Brothers',Jerome Cowan, boat came too late to save Anna, who was left beaten and unconscious, from Tiny's drunken actions. But an angry and uncontrollable BoBo wasn't too late to track Tiny down, on the sea rocks, and have him pay for everything he did with the raging waters of the Pacific Ocean doing the job for himThe relationship between BoBo and Tiny was far more interesting then that of BoBo's and Anna. I got the impression that Tiny was really interested in BoBo as a, without going any deeper into the subject, partner in life more then anything else. Being with BoBo for years Tiny got very attached to the hard drinking sailor and his sudden, after being a free man all these years, wanting to get married and settle down may have well been too much for poor confused, as well as feeling rejected, Tiny to take.