Lang's only film in CinemaScope is this costume drama about a youth's adventures amid a ring of smugglers led by a swaggering Stewart Granger. Eighteenth-century Cornwall has more than a touch of the Germanic, as moody, foreboding, at times nightmarish as it is colorful, complete with buried treasure, murmuring ruins, looming statues, and painted skies. (Andrew Sarris noted that Moonfleet "shares the same bleak view of the universe" with Metropolis.) But the pace is fast, the humor at times on the ribald side. The film represents a side of Lang not often associated with his Hollywood films, but one that would resurface with the broad, comic-book adventure of The Tigress of Bengal (Germany, 1959)-what might be called a critical updating of romanticism. In any case he wasn't romantic about CinemaScope, which he famously dismissed as a ratio "for snakes and funerals" (in Contempt).