Moonfleet is a 1955 Eastman Color swashbuckler film shot in CinemaScope directed by Fritz Lang.

A gothic melodrama set in England during the 18th century, the film is about John Mohune, a young orphan (Jon Whiteley), who is sent to the Dorset village of Moonfleet to stay with his mother's former lover, Jeremy Fox.

Fox (Stewart Granger), is a morally ambiguous character, an elegant gentleman intimately involved with smugglers.

[3] On the run from the law, Mohune and Fox must decipher a coded message in their pursuit of a fabulous diamond hidden long ago.

I plan to light my principals just as you would in a play, dropping shadows on the sides of the stage to concentrate on the main action and the players involved in it.

During filming, James Dean visited the set; Stewart Granger said his manner was rude and dismissive.

"[8] Granger later said : "I hated working with Fritz Lang – he was a Kraut and it was a bloody awful film.

"[14] Houseman says one time during filming his associate producer, Jud Kinberg, "came down to the stage and heard this awful caterwauling.

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.