The movie Moontide (1942) was one of the earliest of Ida Lupino's films that I watched, nearly four years ago. I found it while looking to discover "noir" films, due to its presence in a DVD collection of 20th Century-Fox noir films.
Moontide may not be classic noir in its storyline, but it certainly has exceptional noir cinematography. It left a big impression on me—for its touching romance, its tremendous performances, and its unique and memorable atmospherics—dark and claustrophobic despite its mostly-outdoors setting on a foggy bait barge in Los Angeles harbor.
Moontide is also notable for being the first of only two American films made by the legendary French film star Jean Gabin.
This is part of a series of posts on the making of that film.
Origins: The novel
The story of Moontide begins with the prolific character actor Willard Robertson. Born in 1886, Robertson began his career as a lawyer, but with a strong interest in writing and acting that led him to switch careers. In the early 1920s, two of his plays were adapted into films. Around 1930, another writing gig brought him out to Hollywood, where, initially out of curiosity, he fell into character acting in small roles. By 1940, a reporter encapsulated Robertson's feelings as, "He has been typed so hard, there is not much pleasure in making pictures, and his only interests are boats, deep-sea fishing and books."
In the spring of 1940, Robertson was cast as a Mormon elder in the big budget 20th Century-Fox epic Brigham Young, starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Dean Jagger. The company spent many weeks on location in Utah, the Sierra-Nevada and other locales. Robertson said the only thing to do at nights was to play poker, and he did not like poker. So he retired to his cabin and wrote a novel—his first. That novel became Moon Tide, published in late August 1940, around the time that Brigham Young premiered.
The novel Moon Tide attracted a lot of attention before it was even published. In mid-August, Variety reported that "virtually all major film companies" were interested in the screen rights and that story editors compared the writing to that of John Steinbeck. Reviews of the book published over the next few months were almost uniformly positive. A reviewer in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote, "It is a moving and ironic tale, told with tenderness and commendable restraint." The Chicago Tribune said that the novel "indicates definitely that writing is [Robertson's] natural field."
A few weeks after the novel's publication, Variety reported that the price for the screen rights had been placed at $25,000, and at some point over the next few months, 20th Century-Fox closed the deal for $30,000. (That is equivalent to well-over half a million dollars in 2020.) Robertson must have been thinking of a screen adaptation early on, as he later said that he had written in a good part for himself. That role, however, would eventually be played by Claude Rains.
After selling his novel, Robertson continued his character acting career. He also found the time to write at least two more novels—"South from Yesterday", published in 1943, and "Oasis", published in 1944. I don't believe either were adapted into films, though 20th Century-Fox appears to have been interested in the former in its early stages, according to a December 1941 item by Oakland Tribune columist Wood Soanes.
On April 5, 1948, Robertson died suddenly in Hollywood at the age of 62. One of his last of his 144 film credits was in the Warner Bros. drama "Deep Valley" (1947), starring Ida Lupino.
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