The Moonraker
The film takes place in the 1652 during the British Revolution. Oliver Cromwell is in power, having just defeated King Charles II(Gary Raymond) and the royalists in the battle at Worcester. Charles, known colloquially as Charles Stuart, must flee the country to avoid being executed like his father, King Charles I, by Cromwell and his “Roundheads”. Assisting him in this escape is Earl Anthony, Lord Dalish , (George Baker) a Royalist and friend. He is known as The Moonraker, the name used for smugglers who bury their take and then rake it back up by moonlight. There are prices on the head of the Moonraker and his royal charge. The goal is to get the King to a boat to take him to France for safe exile before Cromwell, always assisted by citizens who want the reward money, can stop them.
The action takes place all in one day in which the King , the Moonraker and their friend, Lord Harcourt (Clive Morton), have to stop at a town when the King’s horse throws a shoe. They are ratted out by the blacksmith to Cromwell’s army and pursued to the home of royalist friends where a sword battle ensues. Thanks to the Moonraker they succeed in eluding capture and the King and Lord Harcourt wait in the forest while the Moonraker arranges with an innkeeper who is his friend to get passage to France. Along the way an undercover man for Cromwell infiltrates a carriage of people going to the town where the inn is located and discovers that another guest at the inn where the carriage stops is the Moonraker. More swordfights ensue but ultimately the Moonraker, the King and Lord Harcourt escape. The Moonraker also makes off with the heart of a young lady (Sylvia Syms) at the inn who was supposed to be marrying Cromwell’s top officer but ends up trying to protect the Moonraker from her fiancé. The last scene is her watching the ship carrying the King and the Moonraker sail away and she looks like she wants to wait for them to come back. As it happens the King was not able to return for eight more years to be restored to the throne so that would have been quite a wait.
This movie was made almost three hundred years after the Restoration of the monarchy but Cromwell is still being depicted as something akin to the anti-Christ. All the Roundheads are ultra-pious prigs who wish for the death of all royalists and anyone else who might want to have a good time. The royalists are either devilishly handsome cavaliers who are perfect in every way (The Moonraker ), lovely refined people of high character and breeding (the family who tries to shelter the King) or fun loving wild men like carriage passenger Lord Parfit (Paul Whitsun-Jones) who ends up dying to help the King escape.
Parfit has the best line in the film. When the carriage is stopped for the umpteenth time for Cromwell’s soldiers to check the passengers’ credentials and Parfit is asked where he is going and for what purpose he replies that he is going to Bodium for “riotous living”. Good man. Having read a bit about Cromwell, he had some good ideas even though he was a bit loony on religious issues and could be stunningly ruthless in defeating his enemies. He introduced a representative government and what amounted to a Constitution, reforms that had a lasting positive effect on his country, and ours. It sounds like Charles I really had that beheading coming to him. When Charles II returned after eight years of exile he tried to make it work but he was a spendthrift who always needed money (I feel your pain, Chuck) and in the end didn’t let the Parliament do much of anything. Setting aside the politics of the film, it’s a rousing tale with a lot of action, not at all boring even in the rather ridiculous love scene. So, it’s one of those fun costume affairs that holds the attention but doesn’t amount to much.
Considering that the entire story is the effort to save the King’s life, Gary isn’t in the film that much. It’s mostly about his savior who apparently is a character of some legend, whereas Charles II’s legacy is perhaps best left “undelved” (as Gary himself said of some of the Rat Patrol episodes). The first part of the film is delightful as Gary has to pretend to be the Moonraker’s servant in order to avoid detection and the Moonraker and Lord Harcourt waste no time in tweaking their King.
Gary is wonderful in subtlely portraying the King’s slightly put out reaction to this ‘demotion’ and his vow to make The Moonraker drink an entire crate of the ale that his ‘master’ orders for him at the town inn where they stop to get the horse reshod. Gary easily conveys that he is a noble gentleman in his bearing, manner and swordplay. He does some heavy duty fighting in one scene, all that training for Shakespeare at RADA paying off in his very first film. He also handles and rides a horse with complete assurance, very impressive for a city boy. I did love the way he said “The Devil take it!” when his horse threw the shoe at the beginning of the movie. All in all he acquitted himself very well in his first big screen appearance.
There’s a precious baby boy in this film Gary looks young, young, young. He looks fetching in his ‘servant’ clothes and one only wishes he could have been shown in his Kingly finery too. At one point Charles Stuart is described as “pale skin, long nose and about two yards tall”. That would be two yards and two inches, sir. Yes, yes, yes to the pale skin which looks absolutely pristine. As for the long nose, that doesn’t apply at all. Guess they didn’t feel like ruining Gary’s adorable face by putting one of those Virginia Woolf noses on him like they did on Nicole Kidman for “The Hours”. Gary’s nose is one of his most distinctive features. It is a bit short and a little bulby at the end-really cute. It was the first thing that made him instantly recognizable to me when I saw him in The Foreigner, a film made 45 years after this one.
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