Least Wanted—Film Noir’s Character Actors: Harry Morgan

In Moonrise, we first see Billy Scripture at a dance, being teased by a group of young men and women who bait him with a glittering compact mirror—he likes shiny objects—and laugh as he clumsily grabs for it. When Danny breaks in and stops their fun, his protectiveness toward someone even more cruelly ostracized than himself shows a better side of his confused and rough-edged character—though the darker side re-emerges moments later when he wonders aloud, dismissively, why he is “talking to a dummy.” Morgan is able to inhabit this helpless and childlike man without condescending to him, and to convey Billy’s adoration of Danny without sentimentality. His wordless performance fits into a film that shows Borzage’s roots in silent cinema, filled with visual symbols and expressionistic effects, like the opening montage that compresses Danny’s family history and early life into a concise but devastating shadow play.

Billy’s most important role in the story is to find the jackknife that Danny lost in the woods during a fight in which he accidentally killed a long-time enemy. Desperate to get back this piece of evidence, Danny goes to the shack where Billy lives, a sad little room with newsprint papering the walls and a skeletal iron bedstead. Frantic and frustrated because he can’t make the deaf man understand what he wants, Danny screams at him angrily. Billy opens his mouth wide as though mimicking him, or vainly trying to force out a sound, and then, in a heartbreaking touch, he strokes Danny’s lapel. Something about this appeasing gesture seems to prompt the brutal attack that follows—as though it were gentleness and kindness itself that Danny is throttling. The scene has a kind of horrible intimacy, as they fall across the bed amid the lurching shadows from a swinging lamp. When Danny comes to his senses and lets go, Billy’s gasping breaths are loud in the silence—the only sounds he makes during the whole movie. The most piercing thing in this upsetting scene is not the way that, after the attack, Danny gazes in horror at his hands, more certain than ever that he is cursed by his “bad blood.” It is the way Billy, lying on the bed, gazes up at his protector, who has just tried to kill him, with an indefinable mixture of love and fear that seems to understand everything, and nothing.

Just before this scene comes a lovely moment that serves no purpose in advancing the plot but goes to the heart of the film. Billy, walking home at night, stops where a set of bare, child-sized footprints are preserved in the sidewalk, his own name written below in the cement. This image of a man whose childhood self is literally set in cement connects Billy with Danny, who has been warped by his bitter past and a family tragedy he can neither remember nor shake off. It could be a mawkish moment, the overgrown infant in his knit cap and pathetic, moth-eaten sweater measuring his big work-boots against his own long-ago prints, but Morgan salvages it with a performance that is at once deeply felt and inaccessible. In a cryptic close-up, he shows Billy remembering, or thinking about, something, but it’s impossible to know what.

This kind of fleeting glimpse into another story that the movie doesn’t tell is one of the greatest gifts that character actors can bring. It is not a matter of stealing the spotlight, but of deepening the shadows.