Abe Lincoln in New Mexico

The wild Apaches have taken to the hills, and after them clops the cavalry including a bony scout named Sam Varner (Gregory Peck). In the ensuing roundup, one face is out of place: a blonde woman, Sarah Carver (Eva Marie Saint), prisoner of the Indians for some ten years. Out of pity--and maybe a pinch of desire--Varner takes Sarah and her half-breed son to live on his New Mexico ranch.

Such situations were once the end of Westerns; in The Stalking Moon it is only the beginning. Sarah's "husband" is Salvaje (Nathaniel Narcisco), a murderous Apache with a memory as long as his rifle. As the troop moves West, Salvaje follows like a red plague, killing everything--including horses and dogs--in his path.

Sam and Sarah await the inevitable. "You won't hear him. He just comes," warns Sarah. "I'll hear him," Varner insists. But he never does. Salvaje picks off the ranch's hired hands one by one. Varner at last realizes that the only way around fate is through it and goes out into the woods to confront his pursuer. The stalker becomes the stalked, the suspense winds as taut as a leather thong, and the violent conclusion is as inevitable as moonset and death.

Aiming for the classic genre, Director Robert Mulligan occasionally misfires. But he is saved, somewhat surprisingly, by Peck, who is in private life an avid collector of Lincoln memorabilia. With flashes of ironic humor and his customary rigid dignity, he escapes the boundaries of the role and gives it an honest, Abe-like stature. The rest of the cast is resolutely unglamorous; even Saint has the hollow eyes and concave face of a woman who has been out on the plains too long.

Mulligan's greatest strengths are, in fact, in his honest exploitation of the inglorious West. The stagecoach is a jerry-built, rickety job; the dust storms saturate the sky until there is no room to breathe; the silences and empty spaces reduce men to infinite specks. In perhaps the most daring reversal of stereotypes, Mulligan has cast an actual Apache boy (Noland Clay) as Salvage's son. Clay, 11, offers no Hollywood charm, no cloying cuteness, not even a single smile. Even W. C. Fields would have liked him.

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