The same year Malcolm McDowell starred in Stanley Kubrick’s ultra-violent A Clockwork Orange (1971), he also took the lead in Bryan Forbes’ intimate and melancholy The Raging Moon (a.k.a. Long Ago, Tomorrow), an adaptation of a novel by British author Peter Marshall. McDowell is Bruce Pritchard, a 24-year-old, spirited, working-class fellow who plays aggressively on an amateur soccer team and is the life of the party at home with his parents and at his brother’s wedding.
When a degenerative disease strikes and leaves him paralyzed from the waist down, Bruce moves to a group home for the disabled, where his anger at his fate makes him withdrawn and cynical among patients and church-affiliated staff. Eventually, he falls in love with Jill (Nanette Newman, Forbes’ wife), a wheelchair-bound patient whose engagement to her half-hearted fiance breaks off. Jill’s romance with Bruce draws him out and he begins to enjoy life again, building on his talent as an aspiring writer and fighting the group home administration for the right to have a close relationship with Jill.
Much of the story displays great sensitivity to the psychological toll of disabilities on otherwise ordinary people, the way clueless, non-disabled folks treat those in wheelchairs like children incapable of making decisions for themselves, or like problems that must be dealt with. Forbes (The Stepford Wives) manages to establish the humanity and individuality of Bruce’s fellow patients with just a few strokes and terrific casting.
The director and his cinematographer Tony Imi carefully and creatively balance open spaces with cluttered, often claustrophobia-inducing interiors, underscoring the extremes Bruce and Jill experience in a world that is a huge physical challenge for both. But above all are McDowell and Newman, who paint a convincing portrait of lovers fighting a patronizing establishment for the right to be together. Strongly recommended.