The Moonlighter Reviews

A strange western that squanders some fine talents and uses three-dimensional photography for no apparent reason. MacMurray is a bad guy incarcerated in a small-town jail. He's been accused of "moonlighting," which means that he herds cows by day and rustles them at night. A lynch mob wants to string him up, but he gets away from jail, and the wrong guy, a saddle tramp, is hanged. This causes MacMurray to exact revenge for the taking of the innocent man's life and to pay for a decent funeral for the unlucky prisoner. MacMurray's girl friend is Stanwyck, who is deputized as a one-woman posse when MacMurray goes on a bank-robbing spree. His brother, Ching, looks up to MacMurray and wants to be like him, but he is killed on the very first job. In the end, MacMurray agrees to be captured by Stanwyck, because he knows that she'll be waiting for him when he is released from jail somewhere down the line. There is some good supporting work by Bond as MacMurray's evil bank-robbing partner, and a few laughs are produced by just looking at Elam. The script is stronger than the direction, and the result is that there are interesting people doing interesting things in a rather lethargic fashion. Stanwyck and MacMurray will always be recalled for their pairing in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, although they could have very well been forgotten for the results of this yawner. The 3-D black-and-white photography must have been used just as a gimmick because Warner Bros. knew they didn't have much of a film to begin with and hoped that audiences of the 1950s would be willing to brave the dull headaches that came from those plastic 3-D glasses in order to watch this dull movie.