Discover Top Posts Tagged with #fred karlin

I wish movie soundtracks still sounded like this

The Stalking Moon (1968)

By the late 1960s, the American Western’s zenith had passed, and the genre was reinventing itself. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) unleashed a wave of films in all genres depicting violence more openly and graphically; meanwhile, the rise of the Revisionist Western (1962’s Ride the High Country, 1966’s The Professionals) led to the deglamorization of the genre’s protagonists and their sense of morality. Released by National General Pictures (NGC), The Stalking Moon reunites producer Alan J. Pakula, director Robert Mulligan, and Gregory Peck – no longer a dashing young man – a six years after To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Though the team is a throwback, the mindset of The Stalking Moon fits squarely within a Revisionist Western. Mulligan’s dialogue-light film incorporates elements of atmospheric thrillers and, in its tensest moments, seems to resemble a proto-slasher. As a hybrid thriller-Western, The Stalking Moon – once the narrative pieces are in place – is a sharp-edged, gorgeously-shot affair.

On Sam Varner’s (Peck) last day before retiring from the U.S. Cavalry, his regiment surrounds and arrests dozens of Apache warriors. Among the group is a white woman, Sarah Carver (Eva Marie Saint), and her half-Indian son (Noland Clay; Clay’s ethnicity/race is unclear). That afternoon, Sarah pleads for an immediate escort from the Cavalry’s camp instead of waiting for five days for an official military escort. The boy’s father, Salvaje (Nathaniel Narcisco in redface; Narcisco’s ethnicity/race is unclear), is a ruthless assassin and, according to Sarah, almost certainly in pursuit of their son. The Cavalry commander rejects Sarah’s request, but Sam agrees to take them to a remote train station. At the station, disaster strikes, and Sam invites Sarah and her son to stay with him at his rugged, mountainous ranch in New Mexico. Sarah and her son find the personal adjustments to live on Sam’s ranch difficult, but they have help thanks to ranch hands Ned (Russell Thorson) and Nick Tana (Robert Foster, whose character is a half-Indian scout). But even in this ranch, protected on three sides by treacherous rock formations, Sarah and her son have not yet eluded the violence to come.

Mulligan also appears to make comments on how the United States treated the American Indians of the West, but ultimately never does so. The Stalking Moon never highlights indigenous perspectives, declining to even give Sarah’s son a name or expressive space. These perspectives only exist through implication – the wars of the American West are going poorly for the tribes, and white settlers are moving ceaselessly westward and are cementing themselves in these lands. Sarah and Salvaje’s child, being of mixed race and approximately eight or nine years old, would almost certainly be the target of sociopolitical discrimination and the suspicious gazes of many a stranger. Never discussed by any of the characters is the possibility of such behavior towards the child; if Mulligan and screenwriters Wendell Mayes (1959’s Anatomy of a Murder, 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure) and Alvin Sargent (1977’s Julia, 2004’s Spider-Man 2) attempted to insert subtext regarding the child’s treatment, they do so far too subtly.

Salvaje himself is a largely faceless antagonist who never exchanges any dialogue, let alone a grunt, a cry of pain, a primal exclamation. Like numerous American Western movies too numerous to name, this is a reinforcement of stereotypical depictions of American Indians in Hollywood – anonymous, without specific bearing to the lead characters. Is he pursuing his son to reclaim him or the murder him? The movie never says. To Salvaje’s credit, he is a physical menace that could easily overtake an aging Sam Varner. More often than not during the Western’s heyday, indigenous Americans – whether individually or as part of a collective – would be all too easily slaughtered in a hail of protagonists’ gunfire or explosives (in part because of their antagonistic anonymity). Such developments would serve The Stalking Moon, which is partly a thriller, poorly. Thus, Salvaje is an aversion of the too-easily-killed Indian trope, but his complete lack of non-violent interaction with any character and empty characterization beyond his capacity for violence and vengeance uphold the trope of the anonymous indigenous menace. His physicality and obvious threat to the protagonists serve thriller genre; his nature as a blank slate killer is a legacy from American Western narrative traditions (and now largely a relic to that tradition’s contemporary practitioners).

Now in his 50s when he made The Stalking Moon, Gregory Peck – if only because of Hollywood’s obsession over age – was reaching a point in his career where opportunities for lead roles inevitably begin to decline (but not his influence, as Peck was currently serving as the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). The Stalking Moon will, on paper, appear to be typical material for Peck. His Sam Varner, when no one else will tend to Sarah and her son’s safety, will take the initiative even though this decision, at best, is an inconvenience or, at worst, might cost him his life. As it is so often with Peck, his screen presence – assuredness of posture, the timbre of his voice, and calming persona – engineers a great performance. Even with a screenplay that avoids providing dialogue-driven details about his character’s life, Peck makes Sam Varner another entry in his long filmography of upstanding heroes.

The screenplay also consigns Eva Marie Saint to playing her character as a trauma survivor whose apprehension is pervasive. If one is seeking a role where Saint is able to display the fullest breadth of her acting range, The Stalking Moon is certainly not that movie. But for how the screenplay portrays her character, this is a capable performance from Saint alongside child star Noland Clay as the boy (this film remains Clay’s only screen credit).

Cinematographer Charles Lang (1947’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1959’s Some Like It Hot) and editor Aaron Stell (1958’s Touch of Evil, To Kill a Mockingbird) pay lip service to the Western genre with luxurious takes of the mountains and rock formations that mark their landscape photography. With on-location filming in Red Rock Canyon and Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, the low-to-the-ground, slightly upward-angled camera shots suggest that Sarah and her son, while making Sam Varner’s ranch house their new home, have nowhere to escape to. Dry shrubs line this small, sloped canyon with somewhat steep angles that make even walking without ascending or descending hazardous. Yet Lang and Stell’s collaboration truly impresses during the action setpieces – most notably in a scene where Gregory Peck, in a darkened room, awaits the entrance of the man who has been hunting the people he has been protecting. Before the naming and identification of the slasher subgenre of horror film, The Stalking Moon – noting its selective cinematography and editing in its tensest moments – relies on numerous lighting and staging techniques that the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Friday the 13th (1980) would later adopt. Though shot and edited like a thriller, much of the film has scenes of people-watching: adults observing children, children observing adults, people noticing small behavioral details otherwise glossed over in a less patient movie. These moments of observation substitute for the dialogue and are as important as the most critical pieces of dialogue in the film.

An unconventional score from composer Fred Karlin (1970’s The Baby Maker, 1973’s Westworld) is a restrained effort, making use of a full orchestra but rarely employing the aural grandiosity that an orchestra is capable of. Repeated often throughout The Stalking Moon is the opening motif whistled in the main titles, with the sparse melodies – usually performed by the whistler or a limited number of woodwinds and/or brass – suggesting the vastness and emptiness of the American West, even in the days of westward expansion. Karlin’s music has an unsettling quality that permeates into The Stalking Moon’s most joyous scenes. When Sarah and her son arrive and Sam’s residence for the first time, the cue “Sarah’s New Home” opens with solo triangle before the entrance of a lone flute. The occasional dissonance from the triangle conflicts with the flute – a subliminal, harmonic message (in addition to the various string harmonics used throughout) that Sarah’s dangers have not passed. So often in modern film composing, a director will relegate the music as background noise or the composer themselves will dispense almost entirely of melody. In the latter, numerous modern film score composers have reasoned that melody cannot serve action films or thrillers, so they will compose a wall of amelodic texture instead. But, as Karlin so ably demonstrates in his score to The Stalking Moon, the juxtaposition of memorable melodies and effective action scoring is more interesting dramatically and musically.

Today, The Stalking Moon’s influence has been limited in part due to NGC’s dissolution and sale to Warner Bros. in 1974. For anyone willing to dive into this relatively undiscovered piece of American Western, few of the film’s immediate contemporaries adapted its thriller-influenced cues for their own purposes. Its depiction of American Indians is not as egregious as other Westerns and it appears to make some sort of attempt at commentary, but many of the damaging preconceptions of indigenous Americans make their way into the film’s screenplay. Yet considering the undemonstrative approach that Robert Mulligan takes for his film, The Stalking Moon is a serviceable Western torn between the passing of eras for the genre.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#The Stalking Moon #Robert Mulligan #Gregory Peck #Eva Marie Saint #Robert Forster #Noland Clay #Russell Thorson #Nathaniel Narcisco #Wendell Mayes #Alvin Sargent #Charles Lang #Aaron Stell #Fred Karlin #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

Peanuts (aka Good Grief, Charlie Brown! Peanuts; Columbia, 1962)

This was the first adaptation of Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts on record, predating the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s Jazz Impressions of “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” by two years. Written by Schulz, it’s a comedy album consisting of conversations between Charlie Brown (Arthur Siegel) and Lucy (Kaye Ballard),* accented with music by Fred Karlin.

* - Readers familiar with older Peanuts comics, however, will recognize some of the dialogue was created initially for Violet and Linus.