Liberated from an Apache tribe 10 years after being abducted, raped and bearing a half-breed son, a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) neglects to mention to her Army rescuers that the boy's father is a fierce, bloodthirsty warrior who will stop at nothing until he gets his son back. Director Robert Mulligan was never a filmmaker of compact means--neither he nor his editors over the years ever shaped any of their projects with energy or excitement--and so, to put a western in Mulligan's hands was suicidal. He dawdles over everything, in much the same way that Saint has been made to dawdle over her dialogue. As the retiring scout who takes on the savage beast, Gregory Peck is amusingly shifty-eyed and granite-jawed, but laughs are not what Mulligan is after (humor is wasted on him). The film has the pomp and circumstance (but not the sweep) of a location-rich epic--one complete with a theme, the eternal struggle between races, guaranteed to be taken as metaphor for the racial divide of the times--but it's a dramatic suspense story that falls flat without interesting characters or tension. *1/2 from ****
Review of The Stalking Moon
