Customer Reviews
A soppy film but a good one - The British 'Love Story' - By: Lou Knee, 11 Dec 2007 
An undeniably soppy film, & 1970 must have been a great year for Kleenex Ltd. what with Love Story at the pictures as well. Sentimentality aside, Raging Moon offers little splinters of real spirit along with a fair bit of tenderness. Bryan Forbes again shows his ability at getting alll the goodness & tenderness out of his characters, to make another very human story. McDowell is brilliantly cast as a young working class northerner (a distinction more valid in 1970 than it is now) full of life, suddenly struck down by a mystery illness that paralyses his lower body. He shakes up the stuffy, church run nursing home (in the refined home counties) he ends up in, very much in the way Jack Nicholson did five years later in One Flew Over, & after a difficult settling in period, he soon finds a reason to live again, when he gets to know a pretty, but posh, polio victim there. A doctor's daughter, he knows she would be completely out of bounds to him in the outside world, but here, he is able to let his rough diamond charm do its work on her.
It is essentiallly a story of true love conquering over alll obstacles, including the English class barrier. Forbes is a gentle, subtle director, so he doesn't overstate this factor, the result being, against today's standard of films, this point looks a bit underplayed. He focuses more on the pure blindness of real love, making Newman completely unconcerned of McDowell's lower status, a fact that pleases him, but clearly worries the goodhearted but uptight matron, & visibly distresses the parson who is an overt class snob. It is affecting, so that box of tissues will probably be needed again, & it is sentimental, but it tries not to smother you with it. It feels more intimate than Love Story, is a more gentle exploration of fallling in love, rather than the full on depiction of burning, passionate, 'nothing will get in our way' love portrayed in the Hollywood film, but there is more than a passing resemblance here, as there so often is in movies released the same year! Its British retraint & quietness stopped it being anything like as well known, & in truth it probably can't live with the big money, big star movies like Love Story, but nearly forty years later, it offers a bit in nostalgia value: A reminder of the superb acting ability of McDowell, in his prime here, proving he was just as good at the sensitive stuff as he was at the iconic, laddish stuff he made his name with, & a reminder of the pure loveliness of posh model turned actress Nanette Newman (the director's wife, in a very good performance here). Shot during winter in the days when we still got snow, it has something quite familiar & nice about it, something very English. If you know a lady who loves torturing herself watching romantic movies but has seen alll the well known ones, this could be a nice little present to give, this Yuletide. And you may as well put that box of Kleenex in the same parcel, as this soft hearted movie is very affecting.
