Moontide
After blacking out from an all-night drinking binge, dock worker Bobo (Jean Gabin) wakes up in a decrepit shack on a San Pablo Bay barge.The next morning, the young woman, Anna (Ida Lupino), has rebounded and tidies up the shack while Bobo repairs the boat of Frank Brothers (Jerome Cowan), a wealthy doctor, and his mistress (Helene Reynolds).While they are chatting, Nutsy acting as a voice of reason and encouraging Bobo to accept that he may have reached a point where he wants a home, Anna returns.In town, he tries to spend time with Mildred (Robin Raymond), a prostitute he met during his drunken melee, but he can't stop thinking about Anna and goes back to the barge.Nutsy assures her that wives should leave modesty out of married life and Anna dons the dress, anticipating Bobo's return.Soon after shooting began, director Fritz Lang left the project, rumored to be due to friction he had with Gabin regarding Marlene Dietrich, who had been involved with both men.There were problems regarding the film's location on San Pablo Bay, which had to be scrapped after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the west coast was declared a security zone.The lighting, fog and wave effects, at times dingy and sinister or sparkling and romantic depending on the scene, led to Clarke's Oscar nomination for cinematography.Surrealist Salvador Dalí was hired to create the drunken montage at the top of the story but his sketches were deemed too bizarre, and the scene was shot with only some of his influence (most likely the close-up of the clock, the headless woman) intact."[5] In 2013, Dave Kehr (also of the Times) wrote that Moontide "provides an illuminating link to one of the frequently overlooked sources of noir: the movement known as 'poetic realism', which flourished in France from the mid-1930s until the onslaught of war...a rootless, hard-drinking French sailor, Bobo (Gabin), achieves a tentative domesticity operating a bait shack with Anna (Ida Lupino), a waif he has rescued from a suicide attempt."[6] When the DVD was released in 2008, critic David Mermelstein, writing for Variety, wrote "A twisted romance set among waterfront lowlifes, the b&w pic resonated with neither critics nor auds, though as this DVD debut makes clear, there seems every reason to hope cineastes may now embrace it for what is always was: a keenly observed, highly atmospheric film distinguished by several superb performances and a captivating, if quotidian, mise-en-scene.