"THE STALKING MOON"........HAPPY 50TH......IF ANYONE STILL REMEMBERS IT......

The Stalking Moon (1968)    Watching this again, we still stand perplexed on multiple issues.......

              A western suspense thriller?  Who'd be the target audience 1968?  How would you market such a film?

              Directed by......Robert Mulligan?  A guy who specialized exclusively in character driven, deeply felt dramas? ("To Kill A Mockingbird", "Love With The Proper Stranger", Inside Daisy Clover", "Up The Down Staircase")

              What in the world would have attracted Mulligan to this material.........a spare, primal tale about a taciturn ex-Cavalry scout (Gregory Peck) protecting an emotionally damaged woman (Eva Marie Saint) from the rampaging, Angel-Of-Death-like Apache who abducted her and fathered her young son.

               You'd think a director like Mulligan would really dig into these characters and provide the kind of probing dramatic subtext that you wouldn't normally expect to enjoy in a western......

                Nope. Never happens. The movie looks mediocre and generic from beginning to end.......like it was directed on the fly by some TV hack, who pumped out "Rifelman" episodes.....

                Peck and Saint get nothing to work with in the script......... unusual for him, Peck never nails down his character, who swings back and forth from irascible loner to benevolent protector, depending on which scene he's in. Saint is left to stand around and project silent suffering.

               The film also has no idea how to handle its mostly unseen villain........the murderous Apache who pops up in the film's last section as a horror film boogeyman. Throughout the movie, he's an invisible booga-booga presence.....casually slaughtering people on his inexorable trail to track down Peck and Saint in order to presumably reclaim his son......

                That sounds like a decent horror movie trope.....(and the film's initial trailers tried selling the movie that way.....)......but suspense and impending terror were way, way out of Robert Mulligan's skill set.  Lacking any attempts at dramatic heft, Mulligan couldn't even work up a good scare or two......the movie ends up as a stillborn, weak mess, a failure at all the genres (drama, western, thriller) it hoped to blend together......

               Sorry, but the passage of 50 years hasn't improved "The Stalking Moon" one bit.......it's still a curious failure from a director who strayed too far out of his comfort zone, with no idea what kind of movie he was making. 1 star (*).