Being from Louisville, Kentucky, it is hard to be objective about this movie.

Considering the times this film depicts, that is the closing days of Prohibition and in the depths of the Great Depression, it is also hard to take these characters too seriously, for after all they are all on the make in some way, which makes this so much fun to watch.

You don't give a damn who wins !!!!

Patrick McGoohan's character as a crooked G-Man is par for the course, and Richard Widmark's corrupt dentist with his little sexy bundle in tow and other hangers-on may not be your average Louisvillian, though I imagine he does need a fair amount of medicinal alcohol for his private use, especially around Derby Week !!! (After all, what's a Mint Julep without bourbon.)

Alan Alda is quite good as 'Son Martin', who is sitting on a fortune in moonshine, patiently waiting for repeal.

Add all the local color provided by a good supporting cast, and you have a watchable movie, though you do have all these Hollywood types trying to get by with bad Southern drawls and over-the-top acting.

One highlight is seeing a young Teri Garr strip naked at gunpoint,(at least I think it was her, since we had a brief rear view. Could have been a body double).

Best watched with a full jar !!!!

This is an elusive movie to see. As a McGoohan fan it had a particular fascination for me. After all the moonshine that has been written about him I was curious to see what 'The Prisoner' actually did do next :-) A maddeningly ill-executed movie seems to be the answer. That's not to say it's a bad movie. Elmore Leonard had stopped writing cowboy books around the late Sixties and as he progressed toward the modern noir he has become feted for, he wrote this story. The movie clearly was meant to tell a tale that began with whimsical criminality but segued into dark, wicked evil - a modern moral fable that reminds us that vice is Vice, however entertainingly dressed-up it might be.

Unfortunately the film-makers failed to 'make the segue' and so the whimsy just becomes increasingly and uncomfortably sinister; without it's moral 'message' becoming clear. Nowadays, with our experience of the Leonard formula, the viewer can figure out what is going on. In 1970 I suspect the audience was just baffled by what must have seemed a wholly inappropriate approach to evil. A contemporary and more popular movie, 'Kelly's Heroes', was similar in mood and execution I felt. The advantage Kelly had was that it had a briefly dark opening scene and then the rest of the tale was whimsy.

The performances in the movie by Widmark and McGoohan are impressive. Widmark goes right back to his roots in movies. He has a confederate (Lee Hazelwood) to carry out Widmark's 'Tommy Udo moves', which left the great man free to exhibit a lazy, lecherous side to his gangster-dentist caricature. An innocent couple in a diner are stripped naked because Hazelwood "likes the look o' their duds" Hazelwood later commits the psychotic murders that should have switched the mood of the movie around, but didn't.

Meanwhile McGoohan explores the role of a greedily foolish, slightly cowardly, villain. His revenue-agent is humiliated by the Moonshine Hillbillies, in a scene where he is 'de-bagged' and hung out of his hotel window. Angrily he brings in the dentist enforcer but the hapless 'Revenoor' is soon overwhelmed by the sadism of real criminals. Swept along by a tsunami of terrorism, McGoohan's character is increasingly out of his depth and belatedly seeks the shore of virtue by switching sides to help Alan Alda repel the Widmark tide. However, before that he has succumbed to the greedy temptation of leading his fake Revenue Enforcement team on a search for booze, and half-heartedly participated in the threatened lynching of Alda's only friend, his black retainer. (This scene bears an eerie resonance of one from another McGoohan movie: 'Dr. Syn')

Alda is curiously blank throughout the movie. A host of interesting people swim around him but he seems oblivious to all of it. The climactic scenes rely on him having become ostracised as a result of his refusal to hand over his cache of booze. This obstinacy brings Widmarks' reign of terror upon the neighbourhood. Those neighbours not only refuse to help Alda in his final stand-off but actually assemble on the nearby hill to watch his expected demise at the hands of the gangsters. Alda's only friend is the black man, and the repentant 'Revenoor'. There was probably a lesson in all of this, but Alda's inability to engender our remotest interest in him, just makes the viewer a tad confused.

McGoohan ends the movie, sitting on a barrel, looking deeply disappointed. I wonder if he'd just viewed the last 'rushes'? Flawed as it is, this film deserves viewing because it has some great stuff going on and all concerned at least can boast that they spotted the potential of Elmore Leonard earlier than most.

McGoohan and Widmark together has got to be worth an hour and a half of anyone's time :-)

After reading Mr. MacIntyre's review about "The 1932 Moonshine War" I'd have to conclude that Mr. MacIntyre's review of this movie was 80 percent ignorance and 20 percent assumption.

The movie is based in the last days before the repeal of the 18th Amendment of the U.S. Constitituion which made it a crime to import, buy or drink alcohol. A complete failure in regard to legislation. The principle of the movie revolved around a LARGE stash of 8 year old whiskey owned by Alan Alda's char acer that distributors would of paid twice their weight in gold for. What Mr. MacIntyre's missed was that the time and place were during the Great Depression in the Kentucky, the American South, which was triple-poor compared to the rest of the world. Alan Alda's character was not part of a family, but a member of a community who made whiskey to sell to the rest of the country because the soil of their farms could produce little else to keep them from going hungry. It was choice many people made during those times. The whiskey for Alda's character was a legacy from his father and his ticket out of the poor house along with his lady friend. Part of the dialog was leaving to go live in California, the eternal promise land even by today's standards.

Patrick McGooan's character was CROOKED, as in criminal, Federal officer looking to make himself rich from his old Army buddy "Son Martin's" whiskey. He was anything, but hard working and when confronted by the black man with the shotgun, even less so. Thus, his contact with Richard Widmark and his gang. When the gang found they no longer needed McGooan's character they turned on him. In turn Alda's neighbors turned on him, when the gang, posing as MORE Federal officers started raiding his neighbors stills and homes. They refused him service and credit at the local store among other things. I saw this flick as teenager and the storyline has remained with me for decades. It seemed that much of the story revolved around the old nursery rhyme about Chicky Licky who no one wanted to help make the bread, but they sure wanted to help eat it. The same thing is definitive in this movie, but the ending was beautiful in the destruction of the bad guys and the reconciliation of the neighbors. I'm surprised this movie isn't out on DVD or VHS.