Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 239: Fri Aug 29

Moonfleet (Lang, 1955): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This double-bill (with Night and Fog) is part of the Serge Daney season at the ICA. Details here.

ICA introduction:
Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog are two films that influenced Serge Daney’s understanding of cinema and the world early on, shaping the moral and aesthetic poles of his cinematic universe. Their influence would be felt throughout his career as a critic.

Chicago Reader review:
Fritz Lang’s only film in CinemaScope (1955, 89 min.) is one of his most neglected features, at least in this country. (In France there’s a deluxe edition on DVD made especially for high school students.) A kind of 18th-century fairy tale about an orphan in Dorset (Jon Whiteley) who’s adopted, after a fashion, by a smuggler (Stewart Granger), this classy MGM production was adapted from a novel by J. Meade Faulkner by Margaret Fitts and Jan Lustig, and its dreamlike sense of wonder is equaled only in Lang’s German pictures. John Houseman produced, and Miklos Rozsa wrote the stirring score; the fine secondary cast includes George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, and Viveca Lindfors.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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