A Kentucky farmer with a hidden fortune
In The Moonshine War, released in 1970 and directed by Richard Quine, Alan Alda plays John W. Martin, known to his neighbours as Son Martin. It is a role that arrived two years before M*A*S*H made Alda a household name, and it shows a very different side of him: not the quick-talking surgeon of the television series, but a quiet, stubborn Kentucky farmer living through the last years of Prohibition. Son Martin is a man with a secret, and the secret is worth a great deal of money. Hidden away in the hills, he and his partner have stored hundreds of barrels of finely aged moonshine, waiting for the right moment to sell.
The film is based on Elmore Leonard’s 1969 novel, and Leonard adapted his own book for the screen. That gives the story a particular flavour. Leonard was a master of tough, funny dialogue and of criminals who talk themselves into trouble, and The Moonshine War has that tang in its bones. Son Martin is not a gangster in the city sense. He is a local man, a veteran of the First World War, trying to make a living in Depression-era Kentucky, where farming alone barely keeps a family fed. His moonshine is his savings, his pride, and his plan for a better life. He intends to hold it until the price is right, and he is not easily frightened out of that plan.
Alda plays Son with a stillness that suits the character. He does not swagger, and he does not explain himself more than he has to. His Son is watchful, polite, and stubborn in the way that people who have lived close to the land often are. He loves his sweetheart, Lizann, and he wants a settled future with her, but he also knows that the world around him is full of men who would take what he has built if he lets his guard down for a moment. That tension, between wanting peace and having to defend a fortune, drives the whole film.
An old friend becomes a threat
The trouble begins with the arrival of Frank Long, played by Patrick McGoohan. Frank is an old army buddy of Son’s, now working as a federal revenue agent, and on the surface he has come to Kentucky to do his job. In truth, he has come to make a deal. He knows about Son’s hidden liquor, and he wants a share of it. He proposes that Son partner with him, selling the moonshine quietly and splitting the profit, and he makes the offer sound almost reasonable, the kind of arrangement old friends make. But Frank is not a man to trust. He is smooth, ambitious, and willing to use threats when charm fails.
Alda’s scenes with McGoohan are the best in the film. McGoohan, fresh from the success of The Prisoner, plays Frank as a man who is always performing, always a step ahead in conversation, always ready with a smile that does not quite reach his eyes. Alda answers him with restraint. Son listens, weighs, and holds his ground without raising his voice. It is a contest of wills rather than a contest of guns, at least at first, and it works because both actors understand that the real stakes are not just barrels of whisky. They are about who Son Martin is, and whether he will let an old friendship be used to rob him.
The arrival of a third force makes matters worse. Dr. Emmett Taulbee, played with memorable menace by Richard Widmark, is a disgraced dentist turned bootlegger, a man who travels with a violent sidekick and who wants Son’s liquor for himself. Taulbee is not interested in deals. He is interested in taking. As Frank, Taulbee, and Son circle each other, the film becomes a small, tense story of greed, loyalty, and survival in a place where the law is distant and a man’s word is supposed to count for something.
Elmore Leonard’s world, imperfectly filmed
It is fair to say that The Moonshine War is not a perfect film. Critics at the time found Richard Quine’s direction uneven, and Alda himself was sometimes judged an unlikely Kentucky hillbilly. Yet the film has aged into something interesting, partly because Leonard’s story is so well built and partly because the cast is so strong. Will Geer, Melodie Johnson, and a young Teri Garr appear in support, and the Kentucky setting, with its hills, stills, and small-town talk, gives the film a texture that a studio backlot could never provide. The story’s twists, including a clever surprise about where the liquor is really hidden, still work, because Leonard understood how to make a simple situation turn on a single piece of knowledge.
For Alda, the film is valuable as evidence of range. He was a New York stage actor, the son of an actor, with a voice and a manner that belonged to the city and the theatre. Playing Son Martin asked him to slow down, to speak less, and to let his face do more of the work. He does not entirely disappear into the role, and that is part of its charm. You can see the thoughtful, decent man who would later play Hawkeye Pierce inside Son Martin, a man who would rather talk than fight but who will not be pushed around. The performance is not a caricature of a hillbilly. It is a portrait of a man trying to hold on to what he has earned.
Why Son Martin matters in Alda’s career
The Moonshine War came at a turning point. Alda had already made his film debut in Gone Are the Days! in the 1960s and had appeared in films such as Jenny in the same year, 1970. He was still searching for the screen identity that television would soon give him. Son Martin did not make him a star, but it showed producers that he could carry a film, hold the screen against formidable actors like McGoohan and Widmark, and play a character whose strength was quiet rather than showy. That lesson carried into M*A*S*H, where Hawkeye’s jokes often covered a similar quiet determination.
The film also connects Alda to a larger moment in American cinema. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time when Hollywood began to take regional stories seriously, when writers like Leonard were bringing a new, harder-edged voice to crime stories, and when old studio formulas were breaking apart. The Moonshine War sits on the edge of that change. It is a studio film with a literary source, a strong cast, and a story that refuses to make its hero a simple good guy or its villains simple monsters. Son Martin breaks the law, but he breaks it to survive. Frank Long enforces the law, but he enforces it for profit. That moral blur is pure Leonard, and it is part of why the film still rewards a viewing today.
Watch The Moonshine War for Alda’s restraint. Notice how little he moves when Frank is talking, how he watches Lizann when he thinks no one is watching him, and how his politeness hardens into resolve when Taulbee threatens what is his. It is not the flashiest performance of his career, but it is one of the most instructive. It shows an actor learning to trust stillness, and a future star finding, in a Kentucky hillside, the decency and stubbornness that would define his best work.