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The Stalking Moon

The Stalking Moon is a 1968 American Western directed by Robert Mulligan, in which an Army scout escorting a white woman and her half-Apache son to his New Mexico ranch is pursued by the boy's father, a renegade Apache named Salvaje. It stars Gregory Peck as the scout Sam Varner, Eva Marie Saint as Sarah Carver, Robert Forster as the trainee scout Nick Tana, and Noland Clay as the boy, and it was produced by Alan J. Pakula, Mulligan's partner on To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Los Angeles premiere 12 December 1968; Los Angeles opening 25 December 1968; New York opening 22 January 1969¹
Source	Novel The Stalking Moon by Theodore V. Olsen (Doubleday, 1965), optioned before publication¹
Writers	Screenplay by Alvin Sargent and Wendell Mayes, from Olsen's novel; Horton Foote also worked on the screenplay without onscreen credit¹
Format	109 minutes, Technicolor, Panavision, Westrex sound, rated G¹
Budget and earnings	Budget set at $3.5 million and raised to $4 million; $2.6 million in rentals, ranking 47th for the year³
Reception	40% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (5 reviews) and 60% on the Popcornmeter; 6.6/10 on IMDb from about 3,700 votes²^•⁴
Setting	Arizona and New Mexico in 1881⁵

Spoilers

Plot

In the Arizona of 1881, veteran scout Sam Varner is present when a detachment of Army troopers rounds up a band of Apaches who have escaped from nearby reservations. Among them is Sarah Carver, a white woman who has spent ten years as the captive of an Apache named Salvaje, and her half-Apache son. Rather than wait five days for a military escort, she asks Varner, who is leaving the Army for a ranch in New Mexico, to take her and the boy with him. He agrees, and they travel by stagecoach toward his ranch. As Varner comes to understand that the boy's father, Salvaje, is tracking them and killing everyone in his path, he brings the woman and child to his ranch, where they wait for Salvaje to arrive.¹^•⁶

The film keeps its antagonist largely offscreen. Salvaje, played by Nathaniel Narcisco, appears as a nearly invisible menace, and Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, noted that the audience never gets a clear look at him except for his dead hand in the final struggle.⁷

Production

Theodore V. Olsen's novel was optioned by National General Corp.'s Carthay Center Productions shortly before Doubleday published it, according to a December 1965 announcement. Wendell Mayes was hired to adapt the script, Gregory Peck's casting was reported in June 1966, and a $3.5 million budget was set; the deal was National General's first with a major star, and Peck's Brentwood Productions was involved for an undisclosed percentage of the picture.¹

A change of director. George Stevens was hired to direct as part of a three-picture deal with Universal Pictures, but he left the project in March 1967, and Mayes left at the same time. Producer Alan J. Pakula and director Robert Mulligan were brought on in late March 1967, reuniting with Peck after their Academy Award-winning To Kill a Mockingbird. Pakula and Mulligan enlisted the playwright Horton Foote to write the screenplay, though Foote received no onscreen credit; Foote later said he had been given credit for the film by mistake and did not write the screenplay.¹^•⁸ Alvin Sargent and Wendell Mayes received the writing credits.¹

Filming began in January 1968, by which point the budget had risen to $4 million, after repeated postponements of start dates in 1966 and 1967.³ The production shot at Red Rock Canyon, Nevada, among other locations.⁹ The crew included cinematographer Charles Lang, editor Aaron Stell, and composer Fred Karlin.⁵

A casting director for Pakula-Mulligan Productions discovered the child actor Noland Clay, an eleven-year-old Apache boy, on the White River Reservation in Arizona; he was one of several Apache boys flown to Los Angeles for screen testing, and his salary of at least $1,000 per week included a trust fund for his education.¹

Style and adaptation

Mulligan described the project as "kind of Hitchcock in the West, a Western full of terror as opposed to adventure." The adaptation stripped Olsen's novel heavily: the boy's sickly baby brother, the woman's pride and loquaciousness, Sam's desire for family and his marriage to Sarah, and Salvaje's backstory as the sole survivor of a massacre are all gone from the film. The result is spare: about five locations and as many principal characters, two of whom, the boy and Sam's ranch hand Ned (Russell Thorson), speak a combined total of ten words.¹⁰

Mulligan himself judged the outcome harshly: "It just didn't work, and a lot of that may have to do with the basic silence of the movie."¹⁰ The film was the last collaboration between Mulligan and Pakula, who ended their partnership amicably afterward; the critic Kent Jones wrote that in atmosphere and design it anticipates the brooding Pakula films that followed, such as The Parallax View, and that Pakula never made a film as emotionally taut and precise.¹⁰

Reception

Contemporary criticism was largely negative. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The New York Times on January 23, 1969, called it "a rather pious, unimaginative suspense film" that "moves stolidly forward with more dignity than excitement." Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, called it "a brutal horror story in a Western setting" and argued that the plot proceeds fraudulently to prolong the movie, with characters failing to shoot or explain themselves when doing so would end the story. Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times in February 1969, gave the film two stars and wrote that it "frightens us in all the regulation ways" but fails as both thriller and Western, faulting a plot in which the hero repeatedly passes up clear shots at the pursuer.¹⁰^•⁷^•¹¹

Kael also objected to the film's portrayal of the Apache antagonist, writing that it returned to "the most primitive movie image of the vicious savage" after years in which big-budget Westerns had tried to be respectful and sympathetic toward Indians, and she noted that a study guide prepared for schoolchildren read the final duel as a symbolic clash between white settlers and the Apaches of the Southwest.⁷

Later reassessment. In later decades the film found defenders. Bertrand Tavernier judged it Mulligan's masterpiece in 50 Years of American Cinema, his critical dictionary co-written with Jean-Pierre Coursodon, and the film historian Dave Kehr recalled it as a cult item at his campus film society. Kent Jones, in a 2009 Film Comment essay, called it "a genuinely great film" and "an unsung masterpiece of moral suspense," arguing that Mulligan invested his energies not in the terror plot but in the emotional fate of the boy, watched over by three adults who hold a vital center for him.¹⁰ Other later critics have been cooler: Christopher Lloyd of The Film Yap called it "a well-made but cautious early attempt at a revisionist Western," and Dennis Schwartz graded it C+, finding that Mulligan was out of his element in the outdoor action sequences.²^•⁵

Box office

National General, hoping for an Academy Award campaign, placed the film in a few first-run theaters in Los Angeles and New York just before Christmas 1968 to qualify for Oscar consideration, ahead of its general release in January 1969. It earned $2.6 million in rentals, ranking 47th for the year, which Variety called "no better than fair, considering its cost." It was reissued the following year as support for Universal's Hellfighters (1968) and NGC's The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), and it performed comparatively well in Paris, where it outgrossed Mackenna's Gold, The Undefeated, Hang 'Em High, and Five Card Stud during the 1968–1969 season.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1961 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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