jfarms1956 This movie is geared for those who are 10 and up and who have a desire for adventure in their soul.Moonfleet will provide an evening of entertainment. Stewart Granger is the only real actor in this film. Jon Whiteley is not very good, however, he is very young so I suppose he did OK of a job. The mood and sets of Moonfleet were dark and mysterious, helping to add to the atmosphere of the movie. The movie's pace is a little slow. I expected more action in this movie. The supporting actors were OK but nothing to write home about. Enjoy your popcorn for in this movie you will be able to eat it in peace. I give this movie four thumbs up out of 10. Enjoy.

bkoganbing Although Treasure Island and Moonfleet are set at the same time in Hanoverian Great Britain with a child protagonist, no two stories could be more different. Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island by becoming custodian of a treasure map with the help of some friendly adult companions battles pirates to gain the treasure and has a great old adventure out of it.Young John Mohune played by Jon Whiteley is an orphan lad alone in the world who is sent by his dying mother to seek out a man named Jeremy Fox in the coastal town of Moonfleet for protection and guidance against the cruel world. Fox is played by Stewart Granger who is in one of his least heroic roles on the screen. Granger is the Long John Silver of the story, the leader of a band of pirate smugglers who operate out of that town. Granger gets plenty of protection because he's got the local squire George Sanders and his pleasure driven wife Joan Greenwood on his payroll so to speak. But that's an alliance of convenience.Having young Whiteley dropped on him is certainly cramping his style, but the innocent young man in his explorations has found what could be clues to a big Hope Diamond like diamond that was the foundation of his family fortune, but has been lost for generations. Naturally everybody wants a piece of what that bauble will bring.Fritz Lang returns to a familiar theme of a doomed man who cannot escape what the fates have in store. It's a theme Lang's used over and over in such films as You Only Live Once, Scarlett Street, The Woman In The Window, Human Desire, and others. His best work however in this film is reserved for young Jon Whiteley. I've rarely seen pure innocence better portrayed on the screen than with Whiteley. The young man's scenes with Stewart Granger are some of that actor's best work as well.In fact Stewart Granger was often quoted as saying that he regarded Moonfleet as one of his best films. I think Granger was absolutely right. The film hasn't aged one iota since its release in 1955, it's still great viewing for people of all ages.

telegonus This is a late Fritz Lang effort for MGM, an odd assignment for him in that it's a Stewart Granger costume picture, not the sort of project one would expect the director to have been hired for. The film turns out quite nicely. It's a fairly conventional story of smuggler's on the English coast, features a fine cast of veteran players, many of whom had appeared in pictures of this sort before.That the story is presented in large part through the eyes of a small boy lends it a measure of distinction. We see Granger's character much as the boy does, as a hero, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Granger is excellent in the lead. Despite what appears to be a modest budget, this is a handsome film, in the grand manner. That it's a back-lot picture, thus not a real spectacle, is more than made up for by Lang's manner of dealing with his material. The movie feels like a fairy tale. The ending is unexpectedly moving, surprised me, and is still vivid in my memory.While not a masterpiece, Moonfleet should satisfy admirers of its director and costume picture fans as well.

jc-osms In anticipation for watching this movie, I pulled my "Children's Adventure" novel of "Moonfleet" down from the shelf and read it through. It's a cracking book, scarier, more realistic and certainly more involving than this Hollywood bowdlerisation, which pays scant heed to the narrative, introduces to the fore completely new characters - personified by the Granger/ Sanders / Greenwood triumvirate and basically allows the rest of the book's characters their names and almost nothing of their literary attributes. Of course there's a dash of sexiness too (for example, our first sight of Granger as the debonair but decadent Jeremy Fox is to the backdrop of a sexy gypsy dancer shaking her stuff up close and personal) but the screenplay suffers from a bittiness in trying to accommodate this with the main narrative thrusts of the book (the search for Mohune's diamond, the smuggling backdrop) but ultimately fails its source by a long way. Granger's jealous girlfriend, for another example, betrays him to the magistrate Maskew and then promptly disappears from view thereafter, to be replaced by the manipulative playgirl wife of the equally scheming but unwittingly cuckolded Lord Ashwood character played straightforwardly by an ageing George Sanders. The story which does emerge on the screen is still passable however and gets from start to finish tidily enough, concluding with Granger's sentimental / noble (you decide) sacrifice for his young protégé John Mohune (Trenchard in the novel)and the acting is fair to middling, no more than that. The child acting the young John Mohune character occasionally gets on your nerves as most Hollywood children do but by the end of the film, his presence is tolerable in a Mark Lester sort of way. As for the great Fritz Lang at the helm, you'd hardly know it, apart from one great shot near the start as the young boy comes around from unconsciousness to be greeted by a host of eerie faces crowding the camera lens. It's fair to say the film starts out in a darker vein than it finishes and is the poorer for the compromise, in the end playing like any number of real-life Disney-type adventures "Swiss Family Robinson", for example, here today, gone tomorrow in terms of entertainment value and for me slightly demeaning for a director of Lang's undoubted stature.