Ciel rouge

"Blood On the Moon" is one of those psychological westerns that emerged in the late 40s. Director Robert Wise and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca were both graduates of the Val Lewton film noire school of film making. Photographed in the shadowy dark black and white common to film noire, this picture turned out to be a better than average western.

The story has drifter Jim Garry (Robert Mitchum) riding into the middle of a dispute between cattleman Lufton (Tom Tully) and a group of homesteaders led by Tate Riling (Robert Preston). Riling has hatched a scheme unbeknownst to all together with Indian agent Pindalist (Frank Faylyn) to cheat Lufton out of his cattle and sell them to the army at a huge profit.

Garry is initially hired by Riling but soon sees how Riling is fooling the homesteaders and changes sides. Helping him make this decision is Lufton's daughter Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes) with whom he falls in love. Lufton's other daughter Carol (Phyllis Thaxter) meanwhile, is in love with Riling and betrays her father in the process. This all leads to the inevitable showdown at the end.

The photography is at times spectacular. The outdoor panoramas are breathtaking. However, it is somewhat marred by the cheap looking back projection shots (especially during the stampede sequence) and several "studio exteriors". There also is an excellent graphic fight scene involving Mitchum and Preston.

Mitchum is excellent as the brooding drifter with a conscience. Preston makes a despicable villain using all around him to attain his goals. Bel Geddes is good as the heroine but Thaxter takes the female honors as the gullible sister.

The rest of the cast is comprised of many familiar faces to western fans. Walter Brennan, Charles McGraw and Zon Murray play various homesteaders, Bud Osborne is Tully's trail foreman, Clifton Young and Tom Tyler play Preston's gunslingers and Richard Powers (aka Tom Keene) plays Tully's ranch foreman. If you watch closely you'll also see Harry Carey Jr., Iron Eyes Cody, Chris Pin-Martin and Hal Talliaferro (aka Wally Wales) in various smaller roles.

An good western; a good example of film noire.

The novels of Luke Short paint a dark picture of the old west and Hollywood has made good use of them in making some really good westerns. Blood On The Moon is one of the best screen adaptations of one of his stories.

A quick cursory glance of the films made from his stories, Ramrod, Ambush, Station West, Vengeance Valley, Coroner Creek all of them are pretty dark, almost noir like stories set in the old west. Blood On The Moon has Robert Mitchum as a cowboy sent for by his friend Robert Preston to be part of scheme to grab the herd of cattle baron Tom Tully.

Not that Preston wants to do a little honest rustling, no his is a complicated plan involving getting the small ranchers and homesteaders riled up against Tully and getting a small range war started. He's even seduced one of Tully's daughters, Phyllis Thaxter, into betraying her father with promises of love and undying affection.

All of this is a bit too much for Mitchum for whom it is alluded was quite the hellraiser in earlier times, but now is just sick of it all. Tully's other daughter Barbara Bel Geddes is checking him out if he would only break with Preston.

When discussing this film in his book about Robert Mitchum, Lee Server makes the point that this film was far from what RKO planned for its star. Originally Mitchum was to be the white hat cowboy hero and successor as its B picture western star when Tim Holt went off to World War II. Little did they dream at RKO back in 1944 when Mitchum made his first with top billing, Nevada that he would be in this kind of western and do it so successfully.

Preston had finished with his contract at Paramount and was now freelancing. We now know him primarily for The Music Man, but in his early film days he played many a villain and this one is a study in malevolence. His superficial charm even carries menace with it.

Blood On The Moon enters that list of really top notch westerns that were originally authored by Luke Short. Try not to miss it when broadcast.

The VHS video of this movie is a colorised version of the original thanks to Ted Turner. I refuse to watch it in colour, so I turn off the colour attributes of my TV and enjoy this movie in Black and White. Without the distraction of colour, one gets to enjoy a great story line, some wonderful performances by Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Geddes, and one of Robert Wise's directorial gems.

The concept of the "noir western" is unthinkable without Robert Mitchum. Mitchum, who started his career as a heavy in B westerns and went on to be hailed as the "soul of film noir" for his world-weary cynicism and cool, doomed aura, defined the hybrid genre in 1947 with PURSUED, then followed with BLOOD ON THE MOON. The plot is essential noir: a man down on his luck is summoned by an old partner and cut in on a big deal; when he finds out that the deal is crooked and his friend is an irredeemable louse, he has to decide whether to accept his slide into corruption or fight to maintain his honor. The scheme just happens to involve cheating a man out of his cattle herd instead of some urban racket. The cinematography is literal noir; at least half the scenes take place at night, in a murk that rather obviously symbolizes the difficulty of seeing anyone's true nature.

None of the western clichés are here: there are no rowdy dance-halls or rip-snorting brawls or comical drunks, no steely sheriffs or white-hatted good guys. The mood is somber, tense and ambiguous, but the film does satisfy the requirements for a western: there are cattle stampedes, a savage fight, a gun battle and beautiful sweeping landscapes, including stunning scenes in a snow-bound pass, the white drifts sliced by the tracks of men and horses. All of the performances are restrained and natural. Barbara Bel Geddes and Phyllis Thaxter, as the daughters of the cattle baron targeted by the scheme, both avoid the glossy glamour that so often makes actresses look out of place in westerns. Bel Geddes is appealingly fresh, and does a good job with a character who starts out as a hostile spitfire in pants (she and Mitchum "meet cute" by shooting at each other) and then morphs into a gentle healer in a dress. Robert Preston is perfect as Riling, a smirking cad with an oily face and a plaid jacket; his former partner Jim Garry (Mitchum) sums him up with the classic line, "I've seen dogs that wouldn't claim you for a son." Walter Brennan adds seasoning as usual, this time poignant rather than comic.

Mitchum makes a beautiful cowboy with his long hair and elegantly rugged attire, at once authentic (on seeing Mitch in costume Walter Brennan reportedly declared, "That is the goddamnedest realest cowboy I've ever seen!") and romantic. In one scene he confronts a gunman on a wide, dusty street and walks towards him—that's all he has to do, just walk towards him and the guy knows he's outclassed. (Mitchum's panther walk is one of the glories of cinema—I would love to watch a whole movie of nothing but Mitchum walking.) I don't think Jim Garry smiles once (though he comes close in a gentle scene where the heroine, tending to his injured hand, asks about his fight with Riling, and he answers, "It was a pleasure.") He conveys a profound inchoate sadness, but as always he uses dry humor to keep emotion at bay. He's contained, laconic, defended. Not merely stoic, he's strangely passive, willing to let things go; his strength is tinged with melancholy because he can "take it," but he also feels it. Lee Marvin (Mitchum's one-time co-star) said it well: "The beauty of that man. He's so still. He's moving. And yet he's not moving."

Mitchum is mesmerizing because you sense so much going on behind the cool, impassive facade. It's partly his film-style acting, which happens under the surface, not on the surface. But under-acting can't fully account for his mystery. There's something fundamentally inaccessible, unknowable about Mitchum's characters, and this is what makes them so real. You never feel they are underwritten or inconsistent; instead you feel he's a whole and complex person who can never be fully explained. Despite his much publicized contempt for most of his work, Mitchum brings this tremendous gift to the slightest and shallowest of movies. BLOOD ON THE MOON, however, is worthy of him.

This is perhaps the greatest of the noir westerns. Director Robert Wise had been in charge of the mythical "The Curse of the Cat People," not a sequel to the horror classic, "Cat People," as the studio expected, rather a fantasy film highlighting the imagination of a little girl.

Working with darkness and shadows emphasizing the mood of the picture makes "Blood on the Moon" seem gloomy and pessimistic, but actually the film is more about the redemption of a hopelessly lost cowboy, Jim Garry (Robert Mitchum), who finds meaning in life through the love of a woman, also named Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes) as was the little girl in "The Curse of the Cat People." The opposite of Jim Garry is his so-called pal, Tate Riling (Robert Preston). Rather than redemption, Riling falls deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of depravity, murder, and deception. Even his romance with Amy's sister, Carol Lufton (Phyllis Thaxter), is a treacherous, deceitful one. Riling uses Carol for his advantage, at times against her own family, while she is truly in love with him. Riling has few redeeming qualities and is bad through and through. The relationship between the two, Riling had actually invited Garry to join him, knowing what an expert he was with a gun, is the crux of the film. The story about the feud between the homesteaders, pawns for Riling, and the ranchers is a superficial one. Character studies make the movie worthwhile.

Walter Brennan as Kris Barden, a homesteader fooled by Riling for awhile, has a pivotal role showing how Riling's double dealings and egomania eventually catch up with him and destroy him. "One may smile, and smile, and be a villain" only so long. Barden is a counterpart to Garry's character. Frank Faylen, as Indian agent Jake Pindalest, in collusion with Riling's schemes for self-aggrandizement, on the other hand represents a counterpart to Riling's character.

The title is one of the best ever for a western. Supersitition has it that when there is blood on the moon (a particular atmospheric appearance of the moon), it's a sign that someone is going to be killed. When I was a boy one of my friend's dads operated a movie theater. He had accumulated a closet full of movie posters over the years. One day he was cleaning out his closets and asked me if I wanted the old posters. I eagerly latched on to them. Two posters impressed me above all the others. One was " The Grapes of Wrath" poster; the other was the "Blood on the Moon" one. Something about those titles and the art work on the posters grabbed my mind and my imagination. I didn't get to see either film for many years, eventually seeing them on TV. To me the magic of the posters matched the magic of the movies.