players involved in it." The movie was shot almost entirely on the MGM backlot, augmented by a few shots of the California coast. During filming, James Dean visited the set; Stewart Granger said his manner was rude and dismissive. Houseman said, "I got along fine with Fritz Lang, even though we screamed and yelled at each other. But he was very anxious to make a picture at Metro, and he rather wanted to make a picture with me. On the whole, we managed to turn out something very much off the beaten track-and... we had a good time." Granger later said : "I hated working with Fritz Lang – he was a Kraut and it was a bloody awful film. I wanted to produce and act it in Cornwall and made them buy the book. MGM turned it into a big colour film. Moonfleet was not Lang's type of film – it is a romantic child's film. It wasn't a bad part." Houseman says one time during filming his associate producer, Jud Kinberg, "came down to the stage and heard this awful caterwauling. As he got near he heard: [German accent] "You are not a professional! We pay you a lot of money to be a professional actor, and it seems to me you are stupid, you are lazy, you are nothing at all...!" Jud came around the corner, and saw that the recipient of this was a little boy of eleven!" The little boy being referred to was obviously Jon Whiteley, as he was the only boy actor in the film. But Jon was only nine years old during the filming and not eleven. Reception Houseman later said, "It ended up being rather a crazy type of picture – still much admired by European filmmakers – but, commercially, it was a disaster." The film was a critical and financial failure on release. According to MGM records the movie earned $567,000 in the US and Canada and $1,007,000 overseas. It made a loss of $1,203,000. The film was released in France in 1960 and had 917,219 admissions. The prestigious French film publication Cahiers du Cinéma named Moonfleet as one of the 100 most essential films ever made, listing it at #32. See also List of American films of 1955 Moonfleet & Other Stories, an album by Chris de Burgh based on the novel References External links Review of film at