Very Cool!!!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Not your common variety of western, not even an action entry but a thoughtful look at the last days of the Indian tribes before the reservations took hold. It's a plausible story of these times that unfolds at a leisurely pace and builds to a suspenseful climax. Moon is a violent renegade Indian, hunting down those who have rescued his forcefully abducted white woman prisoner, along with his young son, as they attempt to move them to the safety of civilisation. Movie making veterans, director Robert Mulligan & director of photography Charles Lang, capture magnificent mountain vistas along with the murderous 'stalking' being performed by this Indian known as the ghost of the moon. Evocative music score by Fred Karlin adds atmosphere to this little remembered film. Should interest patient viewers of the genre & those who follow the careers of Gregory Peck and Eva Marie Saint - the interesting Robert Foster makes an impression as Peck's friend.

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 ****

"The Stalking Moon" is a pretty good, if not terribly significant, little western with great performances all around and some very suspenseful scenarios. The plot focuses on army scout Gregory Peck whose party takes a group of Native Americans into custody and retrieve white woman Eve-Marie Saint, who was kidnapped years earlier, and her young son, who was fathered by one of the Indians. When Saint insists that she and her son must get out of the area immediately, Peck gives in and takes them to his father's ranch. However, they are followed by the boy's father, a silent hunter intent on taking back his son. The premise is rather original, and it allows for some spine tingling scenarios near the end of the movie. Unfortunately, the film is, up until the last half hour or so, extremely slow- moving and sometimes dull. Much of the time spent leading up to the villain's arrival (which encompasses about two thirds of the film) seems padded out, with nothing truly significant Taking place for stretches at a time. The fact that the set up takes so much longer to play out than it needs to reveal that in the end, as interesting as it may be, the plot is a bit thin. Although the first section of the film does start to get boring after a while, sitting through it does pay off. After the arrival of the hunter, the movie remains consistently suspenseful, with one particularly memorable sequence in which Peck waits in silence for his approaching foe that manages to build up tension quite well. The final shootout at the end of the film is also quite exciting. The story behind the film's villain is also instrumental in building up suspense. It becomes clear as the film moves along and Peck's character learns of the crimes of his enemy that he is human killing machine, capable of stalking his prey in total silence. The movie's villain never speaks a line and is seldom seen throughout the course of the film, but is nevertheless extremely menacing because of what he is capable of doing. Despite its slow pace, "The Stalking Moon" should still be worthy of one's interest both because of its tense scenarios and because of its solid cast. Gregory Peck makes an excellent hero, as always, eve- Marie Saint gives a melancholy performance as the worried mother who, after years of Indian captivity, barely remembers English, and Robert Forster is good as a member of Peck's party who comes to his aid in fending off his enemy. Overall, this is a worthwhile experience for fans of both suspense films and westerns.

Gregory Peck is an army scout trying to take back with her people a white woman (Eva Marie Saint) that has been rescued from the Apaches that kidnapped her some years before. The point is that she has become a mother while in captivity and the fierce Indian father of the kid (appropiately called Salvaje) goes after them to recover his son no matter what.The plot is quite simple and yet this is not an ordinary western. It is full of suspense and menace, both very well handled by director Robert Mulligan. Salvaje is never at sight but he is always there as a real and deadly menace. The atmosphere is perfectly achieved and the picture is a thrilling experience all along in spite of a bit of excess in its duration; perhaps a 10 minutes cut might have been better.Mulligan was a skillful director, not very prolific, but with other fine films in his account such as the excellent "To Kill a Mockingbird" (also with Peck), the enjoyable "Summer of '42" and the fine thriller "The Other" unfairly underrated no doubt.With "The Stalking Moon" Mulligan tries his hand at westerns and he gets an interesting one that suits the genre's fans and surely thriller's fans too.