Movie review - "The Moonraker" (1958) **1/2

 Not the Bond movie but a swashbuckler based on  a play which predated the Fleming novel so they got dibs on the title. It's set in the English Civil War so like most movies set then the heroes are Cavaliers, but the Roundheads aren't painted as villains just tough.

The colour is pleasing, there's plenty of action and the story is solid, if unoriginal - George Baker is a noble who rescues royalists as "The Moonraker". He falls for a Puritan woman (Sylva Syms) who is engaged to a roundhead (Marius Goring).

So far, fair enough, but the film makes some odd decision - Goring isn't a villain he just has a politically different POV to Baker, so the last duel is between Baker and some other guy with dark hair who looks just like Baker. Too many people in the film look like George Baker, it was hard to tell them apart. (There's a servant character whose wife dislikes her husband's loyalty to Baker - he looked too much like Baker).

Sylvia Syms is beautiful and would be revealed to be incredibly sexy in Ice Cold in Alex but is dull here, just hanging around a manor house spouting lines. I did laugh at her in a puritan hat.

The biggest problem though is Baker who simply isn't a star. He's handsome enough and he can act, but he just lacks dash - all while watching this I kept thinking "you're not a star, a support maybe but not a star". They should've given this to Richard Todd or a new TV swashbuckler like Robert Shaw or Roger Moore or someone.

The support cast variers. John LeMesurier is a strong Cromwell, Goring has an interesting crazy eyed look as a Roundhead but his part should have been bigger. People like Paul Witsun Jones are fun. Gary Raymond is spectacularly unmemorable as Prince Charles, the future Charles II. Actors are normally a strong point of British films but this felt undercast.

It was directed by David MacDonald who made some of the worst British movies of the late 40s. This is one of his better pictures but it's still not that well directed; I think he was saved by his story, the photography and costumes.