Ciel rouge

This film is a dark, brooding affair that has plenty of action and suspense and unfolds like an urban thriller. The story is lean and straightforward in its plot development of a range war, a staple of many westerns. Robert Mitchum is excellent as a drifting cowboy who gets caught in the middle of a feud between cattle ranchers and Barbara Bel Geddes matches him with her portrayal of a tough, feisty ranch girl. Robert Preston is also good as a rancher at odds with Tom Tully in their range war and there's a romantic angle that further complicates matters between the ranchers. The picture has crisp black and white camera work with noir shadings here and there and the music is also good. Of note in the film is a savage saloon brawl notable for its intensity, a brutal confrontation that ranks among the best in any western.

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.

Although RKO was a major studio, in the 1940s an unusually large proportion of its output was low-budget B-movies. And not just any B-movies – psychological urban horrors from the Val Lewton unit, and plenty of gritty thrillers of the type that would come to be known as film noir. There was also a brisk trade in Westerns at all the studios, and RKO was no exception, but perhaps no picture better demonstrates that the studio was practically stuck in "noir" mode than the literally dark Western Blood on the Moon.

Much of Blood on the Moon's bleak look is down to director of photography Nicholas Musuraca, who did the job on many of the Lewton horrors, including the seminal Cat People. Musuraca was quite capable of doing regular (and still very accomplished) cinematography – take a look at I Remember Mama, for which he received his only Oscar nomination – but his speciality was cloaking the screen in vast swathes of black. You would think this would be difficult in a Western, which ought to be full of vast empty plains and sunny skies. But Musuraca uses lighting techniques that can turn anything into a silhouette, or edges and corners into indistinct patches of darkness. He even makes clouds and buttes into foreboding black blobs. But he does not simply dim everything darker – his craft is very precise, and he is capable of throwing sharp white light where it is needed, or creating layers of grey amidst the gloom. Incidentally, while this adds immensely to the atmosphere, it is also probably part of RKO's general trend of hiding the lack of lavishness on a cheap production. After all, who needs a big town set when all you can make out is a door frame and a hitching post? Musuraca's partner in crime is director Robert Wise, another graduate of the Lewton unit. Wise adds to the atmosphere by composing tightly framed shots with bits of scenery and foreground clutter obscuring chunks of the screen. And look at how much of the movement is in depth rather than across the screen. Often characters are moving straight towards us, virtually staring into the lens, and this adds to the aura of menace. Just like in a well-made film noir (as well as those Val Lewton horrors) the overall impression is of a surreal nightmare world from which there is no escape. That is quite an achievement in a Western.

Wise was also an expert at handling the pacing of his pictures, here shooting intense and nasty action sequences, spaced out by moody and measured dialogue scenes. This latter actually gives room for some nice acting performances. Robert Mitchum – a man who made an art form out of laconic moodiness – is perfect for those quieter moments. Like Humphrey Bogart, he was at first mistaken for a supporting player, but film noir gave him a niche as a leading man. Barbara Bel Geddes seems really cut out as Mitchum's tomboyish love interest. Active and assertive parts like the one she has here did not come up often for women in this era, and she gives it her all. Best of the bunch though is Walter Brennan, who looks and sounds like the typical crusty old man, and as such played a part in dozens of Westerns in his time. But under his character actor exterior he could emote beautifully, and in Blood on the Moon you really believe his mourning for his son.

What we have here isn't simply a case of Wise and Musurasca giving a mischievous murky makeover to a good ol' cowboy flick. It seems the project was in noir territory right from the outset. Lillie Hayward, who I don't recall seeing credited anywhere else, but seems to have done a top job, has really just given us a gritty PI thriller out West. Mitchum is not so much the iconic drifter and more a grudgingly moral gun for hire. There is little distinction between the cowpunchers and the homesteaders (although in any case these two groups tended to be fairly interchangeable as villains and heroes from one Western to another – a bit like the North and South in Civil War movies). And interestingly this is one of the few pictures of this time to feature bona fide cowgirls, who shoot, talk and ride like the men. Parasols and petticoats are out of the question in this Western.

Leaving aside all social context and genre subversion, the most important question is surely, is it actually any good? The answer is yes. Blood on the Moon does what any decently made B-flick ought to do – it is neither deep, moving or intelligent, but it gives a quick and reliable round of entertainment.

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.