The Fleet Remains at Harbour

Some movies stick with me despite being neither particularly great or bad. One such film is 1955's Moonfleet. There are so many marks of greatness in this movie but they're each kind of painful because they never quite come together in a satisfying way.

I think this movie mainly stays in my mind because I listen to the soundtrack often, particularly when I'm working on my comic. Composed by the great Miklos Rozsa, it's the greatest pirate movie score that wasn't written for a pirate movie. Well, it's kind of a pirate movie. Set in the 18th century, it centres on smugglers in Dorset, and one malevolent smuggler ghost called Redbeard whose hidden diamond functions as a MacGuffin.

A lot of the changes made to the story for the film seem to have been to court fans of Treasure Island. The book's protagonist, John, is turned into a child and a rogue called Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger) is invented to be his untrustworthy guide and protector.

Their relationship never works as well as the one between Jim and Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Stewart Granger is good as a handsome, romantic hero but he's not as sinister or mysterious as Robert Newton. The little boy in Moonfleet, Jon Whiteley, doesn't come off as discerning as Bobby Driscoll. This is a problem because he's set up as the point of view character but the viewer will always have a better understanding of circumstances than he does.

But director Fritz Lang made this a beautiful film. Here's a fine example of the lost art of conspicuously artificial set design. Lang was still the man who'd made Metropolis and Nibelungenlied. There are three beautiful women in the movie, too.

I love the mad eyes on Liliane Montevecchi, who plays the Gypsy dancer. Joan Greenwood as the wife of George Sanders' Lord James Ashwood, is delicious when she flagrantly flirts with Jeremy.

John meets a girl, too, Grace (Donna Corcoran). She first meets him, startling him, while he's looking at the corpse of a hanged man.

What a visual. Could we call that a meetcute? She seems unperturbed by the corpse, one of the things that makes her seem like she's going to be an important character. But after she leads John to Jeremy's manor, we never see her again. One of many building blocks for the bigger movie this doesn't end up being. Maybe I keep going back to watch it again because the promise baked into it calls to me. It needs to be fulfilled but it never will be. It's like a curse.