The Stalking Moon (DVD)

The Stalking MoonGenre: WesternsLabel: WarnerBrothersDescription: Stalking Moon TheAcademy Award winner Gregory Peck stars as an army scout who rescues a woman (Eva Marie Saint) kidnapped by Apaches 10 years earlier. He takes the woman and her son to his ranch in New Mexico but the boy's Apache father follows them to retrieve his son leaving a trail of death in his path. The single-minded Indian and the trained scout determined to protect the woman and her child battle to the death in game of cat-and-mouse through the New Mexican chaparral. From the novel by Theodore V. Olsen.A scout in the old Southwest (Gregory Peck) undertakes to protect a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) and her half-breed son from the Apache warrior--the woman's captor-husband of 10 years--who wants them back. The scout is a man of estimable courage and resources (again Gregory Peck) but the mostly unseen Apache is a veritable monster of determination cunning and bloodthirstiness: Peck and his two charges doom entire communities to extermination just by passing through the neighborhood. This fierce amalgam of Western and horror movie was the last of seven collaborations between director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula of which To Kill a Mockingbird was the peak. The Stalking Moon isn't peak material but it's a demonically effective palm-sweater and fascinating as a prelude to Pakula's own breakout as director of the great paranoid trilogy Klute The Parallax View and All the President's Men. Robert Forster has an early role as a fellow part-Indian scout. --Richard T. Jameson