User Reviews

Roderick "Chuck" Nelson (John Drew Barrymore), scion of one of San Francisco's wealthiest families and a prisoner of war during the Korean conflict, was never the same after his experiences and his brother, Lexington (Dean Jones), thinks the best thing for him is a Mexican fishing trip to help snap him out of his lassitude. While there, Chuck falls for his guide's daughter, Ginny (Julie London), who confesses she's "a quarter" (black) when he proposes marriage but, deeply in love and a new man because of it, he only replies, "Statistics bore me". Chuck brings Ginny home to his controlling mother, Cornelia (Agnes Moorehead), who seems to outwardly approve but when the couple are photographed in her cousins' (Anna Kashfi & Nat King Cole) nightclub and newspaper headlines scream the young millionaire married a quadroon, all hell breaks loose. Turned out of their hotel, harassed by neighbors, and treated harshly by police, the couple are separated by Cornelia who uses drugs and brainwashing to bring about an annulment on the grounds Ginny concealed her heritage from Chuck. During a sensational courtroom trial with everyone against her, Ginny is forced to strip before the judge to see if she's tan all over...

The Civil Rights movement was a hot-button topic of national concern in the late 1950s when MGM decided to exploit the issue with a soapy saga of miscegenation produced by schlockmeister Albert Zugsmith and directed by eccentric auteur Hugo Haas, a fringe-dwelling cross between Ed Wood and Alfred Hitchcock. Haas, a past master at the puerile potboiler, hit the big time here but thankfully couldn't break free from the methods his obsessive madness invariably took. Low-rent psychodrama is just that and all a bigger budget does is make a silk purse out of a sow's ear to the point where, in this case, Haas' murky run of the mill mise–en–scènes were considered "careful suspense" by the NY Times. What's interesting about this sordid exercise in exploitation is that Haas' mania for masochistic romance eclipses any real opportunity for the exploration of prejudice and the one-dimensional black and white hate comes through loud and clear. No attempt is made to show grey and because intolerance is a given with no hope for the future, the lovers' persecution seems right out of "Oliver Twist". The couple's rocky road does, however, make for entertaining melodrama and the above-average acting for this sort of thing also kicks it up a notch or two.

Sexy singer Julie London, with her trademark mane cascading down her back, gives her "high yeller" a restraint not generally associated with put-upon heroines and John Drew Barrymore's vulnerable Korean War vet showed that sensitivity was actually within the cult actor's ken. The genteel veneer Agnes Moorehead gives her mean, manipulative matriarch adds some class to the crass crises cooked up for our entertainment while Albert Zugsmith's quirky stable of quasi-personalities such as Jackie Coogan, bandleader Ray Anthony, and Charles Chaplin, Jr. make their usual unmemorable impressions. Marlon Brando's volatile wife, the exotic Anna Kashfi, was more famous for her messy divorce than any real talent she may have possessed but she acquits herself nicely as the elegant hostess-wife of nitery owner Nat King Cole who croons the title tune and sings another while tickling the ivories in his swanky club. They're progressive blacks, civilized and wise to the ways of the world, creating a stark counterpoint to the small-minded neighbors, cops, business owners, and family that surround the seemingly star-crossed pair who, incidentally, consummate their love on a beach the night of the quarter moon. Julie's fisherman father is also an exception, a salty Irishman who felt he married above his meager station when he took a "mixed" maiden as his bride and Julie's black lawyer, intelligently interpreted by James Edwards, embodies all that's good in an otherwise predatory profession and makes a revealing "whitebread" role model for his race.

The movie's take on race "relations" plays it safe by making Julie's grandmother a Portugese-Angolan descended from African royalty (which speaks volumes on Hollywood's own bias) and stops short of calling the kettle black in other ways, too. The closest this movie gets to raw reality is a group of neighborhood teens (led by Chaplin) surrounding Julie while taunting, "eenie meenie miney mo" (as in "catch a _____ by the toe...") but that's probably more a case of Production Code prohibitions than any true sensitivity. The movie was obviously inspired by an infamous 1924 court trial that rocked the nation (Rhinelander v. Rhinelander) and although attitudes towards interracial marriage hadn't progressed much in 35 years, change was on the horizon and NIGHT OF THE QUARTER MOON was given a hopeful ending that didn't happen in real life.

The movie may transcend it's exploitative raison d'etre by being first and foremost a love story but there's no denying it's also a "ripped from the headlines" upper-crust "kitchen sink" stinker -and lots of fun because of it. London's Sunday Times awarded this trash classic its dreaded "ring up and complain" rating but I say write Warner Archives and request a re-release on DVD.

This outlandishly bad racial drama comes from MGM Studios, the movie factory which once proclaimed that it had more stars than there were in the heavens. Louis B. Mayer would certainly be spinning in his grave if he were to see the type of films such as this one that the studio he work hard to move to the top was putting out. Even with two Oscar winning films in a row ("Gigi", "Ben Hur"), MGM had plenty of dreck, and this is one of the worst of the lot. It's an embarrasment of amateur cliche's, suffering from a hideously rotten script that can only be described as a dime store novel on celluloid, so obviously exploitive that you wonder how such classy actors as Agnes Moorehead and Edward Andrews could acknowledge being a part of it.

The stars are Julie London and John Drew Barrymore, facing a harsh world simply because of the revelation that she has a teeny, tiny bit of black in her racial makeup. Yes, I realize that this was the late 1950's so certainly there would be cause for concern, and certainly, a wealthy San Francisco society matron like Moorehead's character might object. Moorehead isn't an outright obvious meddlesome mother, and her passive/aggressive nature is revealed slowly. She has obviously coddled her two sons (Barrymore and Dean Jones) a bit too much, but she's very welcoming to London at first, even lending her a fur stole to wear out for the evening. Suddenly, she's ranting on the phone about the newspaper headline exposing London and having Barrymore committed to a sanatarium when neighbors file assault charges against him and London. This leads to the most absurd annulment trial where Moorehead's attorney (Edward Andrews) tries in his most obnoxiously cocky manner to discredit London in every way possible. Only the great James Edwards here shows any dignity as London's counsel, the one human element in this whole fiasco outside London and Barrymore.

As old friends of London's, Anna Kafshi and the great Nat King Cole underplay their roles of advisers against London fighting to get Cole back, making themselves nearly as nasty as Moorehead and Jones. The scene where Barrymore gets out of the sanatarium simply by slugging two large guards is way beyond unrealistic. Edwards cones up with a ploy to have London strip completely to prove there's no way she could hide her race during a nude swim, leading to the most ludicrous way of snapping Barrymore out of his manipulated conclusion. Moorehead is forced to utter some extremely nasty lines (asking London if her son proposed to her in a cotton field, while Andrews seems to be revealing his disgust with the script by saying all his lines through a sneer. This is a true bomb, saved only by the determination of the cast to add a teeny amount of dignity to a film they obviously knew couldn't be saved.

Of course, when you put Albert Zugsmith and Hugo Haas together as producer and director, you aren't going to end up with something approaching GONE WITH THE WIND. Hell, you're not even going to end up with anything as good as FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN.

Julie London is beautiful, but incredibly miscast as a woman with some African heritage passing for white. Even with black hair and a suntan, she was one of the WHITEST women around. It's not for nothing that she later played a character named "Dixie" on TVs EMERGENCY.

But hang on here! For those who would scoff and say that this movie is unrealistic, I've got a piece of news for you. It's based on a TRUE STORY! The whole thing is told in a book called "LOVE ON TRIAL : an American scandal in black and white" by Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone. Lots of this stuff really happened, including the young wife having to bare her flesh before the Judge to see just how "colored" her nipples were.

Unlike the movie, however, in the end, the young husband wimped out and divorced the woman, caving in to his rich father's demands. Money talks.

Too bad.