By The Light Of The Moon

By The Light Of The Moon (1953) — What You Actually Need To Know

Most people looking this up are either trying to find a watchable copy or are confused because they keep landing on the song from Sweet Adeline instead of the Jacques Tourneur film. The 1953 noir is the one worth your time. It stars Dana Andrews and Rhonda Fleming, and it is a solid entry in the lower-budget RKO output that Tourneur was turning out while Howard Hawks had him under contract. The film is based on William Irish's novel Under My Skin, which is one of those Jim Thompson-pseudonym novels that actually isn't quite as bleak as Thompson's later work, but still has enough moral rot in it to carry the picture. The song "By The Light Of The Moon" predates the film by decades. It appeared in the 1929 musical Sweet Adeline and has been recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald. That means if you search the title without specifying the year, you will get playlist results, sheet music PDFs, and YouTube uploads of standards singers. The Tourneur film sits somewhere between B-movie and A-movie in terms of quality — it is well-made but never gets the budget for proper location shooting, so most of it takes place on soundstages that look convincingly like a small Midwestern town until they don't. I spent a few weekends tracking down a clean version of this because my collection had the older Warner Archive disc that was noticeably soft and had some frame drops in the second act. The Warner Archive release is the one most people end up with. It is serviceable. If you want something sharper, the Criterion release is the way to go, but it has been out of print for a while and secondary market prices have crept up to around thirty to forty dollars for a used copy. I picked one up at a local video store clearance bin for twelve dollars and the image quality difference is noticeable, especially in the darker scenes where the RKO stock tends to crush blacks on the older disc.

Where To Watch Or Download It

There is no official streaming home for this title right now. It pops up occasionally on Tubi or Pluto TV when rights shift, but those appearances are sporadic. The most reliable route is purchasing the physical media. The Warner Archive Collection released it on DVD and Blu-ray a few years back, and Criterion has a Blu-ray edition that includes a decent commentary track. Avoid any torrent sites offering supposed "restored" versions — several circulate online and they are just upscaled from the Warner disc with noise reduction applied aggressively, which turns Rhonda Fleming's face into wax plastic. If you are set on a digital rental, check Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, since they occasionally license older RKO catalog titles. The selection rotates every quarter or so. I set up a tracker alert on JustWatch and checked it once a week for about two months before it showed up on Prime. It was there for about three weeks and then disappeared again.

The Film Itself

The plot is straightforward: a Marine veteran returns home after World War II, gets involved with a manipulative woman, and everything spirals downward from there. Dana Andrews plays Ray Bradford, a man whose desperation makes him an unreliable narrator in his own life. Tourneur shoots it with a kind of tired energy that suits the material — he was clearly bored with contract work at this point, and that boredom translates into efficient framing rather than laziness. The black-and-white photography by John Alton does more heavy lifting than most people give it credit for. Alton was a master of low-key lighting and shadow play, and he uses it here to make the entire story feel claustrophobic even when characters are outside. One thing most viewers miss is how the film functions as a postwar anxiety picture. The veteran reintegration angle isn't just a backdrop. Ray's inability to hold a job, his sense that the world has moved on without him, and his quickness toward violence all map onto real social concerns of the early fifties. Tourneur doesn't moralize about any of it. He just shows the mechanics of a man breaking and lets the audience sit with that.

A Specific Issue I Ran Into

When I was digitizing my copy for archival purposes, I noticed that the Criterion Blu-ray has a few seconds of missing footage in the third act around the eighty-minute mark. The scene where Ray confronts his boss at the factory has a jump cut that isn't in the original theatrical version. I tracked this down to a bad source master problem — the film element used for that section had damage, and the remaster team stitched together a take from a different camera angle rather than restoring the missing frames. The workaround was straightforward: I pulled the Warner Archive DVD transfer for that specific segment and synced it into the Blu-ray timeline using DGIndex for the remux. It isn't perfect, but it covers the gap and you don't have to watch a jarring edit point that nobody else seems to have flagged. People tend to rate this below Tourneur's Cat People and Out of the Past, which is fair but also misses what it is actually doing. The film is less about suspense and more about character erosion. If you approach it expecting a tight thriller, you will be disappointed. It is a slow burn about a man who makes one compromise after another and eventually realizes he has no exit. That structure rewards patience in a way that Tourneur's more famous thrillers don't, because those films have plot mechanics that carry you forward. This one asks you to watch someone dig his own hole. The common pitfall is assuming Rhonda Fleming's character is simply a femme fatale. She is not. She is a product of the same economic pressure that drives Ray. The film gives her slightly more agency than the genre typically allows, even if it ultimately punishes her for it in the conventional way. That nuance gets lost if you skim through it on a first watch.

There are also a couple of audio sync issues on the Criterion disc that are easy to miss but annoying if you notice them. They happen during the nightclub scene near the middle. The fix is a minor delay adjustment in your receiver or player settings — usually around negative thirty milliseconds. Look it up in the forum threads if you catch it. Buy the Criterion disc if you can find it at a reasonable price. The Warner disc works fine for a first viewing. Skip any stream rip or torrent version unless you are okay with variable bitrate artifacts and inconsistent audio levels. This film doesn't demand premium gear to enjoy it, but it does deserve at least a decent presentation to show what Alton was working with.