Blood on the Moon (1948)

A letter from his old friend Tate Riling (Robert Preston) asks luckless and pretty beaten cowboy Jim Garry (Robert Mitchum) to come to a never named Indian reservation far from his home to help Tate out with something he doesn’t specify, but that is clearly important.

That “something” turns out to be a con cooked up by Riling and a corrupt Indian Agent. Until now, the reservation’s meat has been provided from the cattle herd of John Lufton (Tom Tully), but the agent hasn’t accepted their newest deal and is throwing Lufton and his herd off the reservation. If they aren’t gone in a couple of days, the military’s coming in to confiscate the cattle. It would be quite a shame if Lufton couldn’t leave the reservation in time for some reason and had to sell his cattle off for cut-rates to someone. To keep Lufton on the reservation, Riling has riled up the local homesteaders whose lands Lufton’s herds will have to cross, cooking up his own pocket ranch war. Lufton’s pretty stubborn however (and really in the rights), but Riling’s too greedy not to hire gunmen to keep Lufton where he wants him.

Garry’s none too happy with the whole affair, but he has been beaten down by life so much he still agrees to help Riling out with his shady business. However, his conscience can’t be kept silent for long once people start losing their lives, and eventually, drawn by it and coaxed by Lufton’s tough daughter Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes) who sees the man he could be in him more than the one he is right now, he is going to change sides.

Stylistically and thematically, Robert Wise’s very fine RKO western Blood on the Moon is a film very close to the noir genre. Mitchum’s basically playing the kind of guy he was typically asked to play in noirs, just wearing a differently shaped hat, while being faced with a western version of a noir plot. Riling’s a figure more common in the noir than the western too, a sometimes charming sociopath who can’t see a conscience or any kind of personal ethos as anything but a weakness he can use but never actually comprehend. He’s also the film’s femme (well, homme) fatal(e), given his predatory relationship with Lufton’s other daughter, Carol (Phyllis Thaxter). That’s a nice twist on the formula, and not a completely surprising one in a film that puts a lot of effort into not letting its two female characters fall into clichés, but treats them as psychologically complex personalities just like the male characters. You could even argue that Amy’s the actual hero of the film, and if anyone would ever remake this one, I hope she’d very visibly be. I suspect co-writer Lillie Hayward will have had something to do with the film’s more fleshed-out female characters, though what I’ve read of the novels of Luke Short, on whose work this is based, does feature comparatively strong female characters for its time and genre.

Uncommon for a western – but of course very typical for a noir – much of the film takes place by night and in the dark, DP Nicholas Musuraca bathing the west in expressionist and often pretty damn claustrophobic shadows that turn the very familiar world of the quasi-mythological west unfamiliar again. It’s no wonder that Mitchum’s Jim Garry has his troubles seeing the light in these surroundings.

Of course, despite all these parallels, philosophically, Blood on the Moon isn’t a noir at all. It may have an honest and somewhat ruthless streak in its treatment of characters and their inner struggles, but where a noir hero more often than not will either die following his better nature or survive by forsaking it, this film follows the more hopeful rules of the western, where redemption can indeed be found without dying and where change for the better is a possibility a man can grasp and hold onto. Here, psychological struggles can be won and someone can indeed become a better person through it.

This could of course lead to an unpleasantly tacky kind of ending, or one of those classic movie happy ends that feel ridiculously tacked onto a film of quite a different spirit, but Wise, the writers and the cast play it as a perfectly logical consequence of what we’ve learned about these characters, turning the happy end into something that still fits the psychological depth of everyone involved.


While he’s at it, Wise also adds some cracking good scenes of western action to the mix, gives character actors like Tully and Walter Brennan their chances to shine besides fine performances by Mitchum and a very young yet note perfect Bel Geddes, turning this into as perfect a western as one can encounter, despite some of its elements being perfectly atypical of the genre.