Blood on the Moon (RKO, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 4) Turner Classic Movies was showing a couple of old favorites of mine that Charles and I had watched together in the 1990’s back during the good old days when I was literally buying lots of VHS tapes and taping TCM by the yard. Both were from an interesting afternoon on the network in which Eddie Muller was the host and he was given the brief to pick films that had characteristics of film noir but weren’t really, including Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux; Robert Wise’s 1948 film-noir-in-Western-drag Blood on the Moon; and Preston Sturges’ 1948 black-comic masterpiece Unfaithfully Yours. Muller’s outro to Blood on the Moon stated that it was not, as I’d been long writing in moviemagg, the first film noir Western. He mentioned a long list of antecedents, some of which are on the imdb.com “Western film-noir” list page – though that one contains a lot of movies I wouldn’t consider noir at all, including John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946), William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), and David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun (1946). Among the films before Blood on the Moon that could qualify as noir Westerns were Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946), Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), Lewis Allen’s Desert Fury (1947), John Farrow’s California (1947), and André de Toth’s Ramrod (1947). But Blood on the Moon is certainly an early precursor to the “noir Western” cycle, two years before Winchester .73 (1950), starring James Stewart and directed by noir veteran Anthony Mann.

Blood on the Moon was based on a novel serialized in the Saturday Evening Post by formula Western writer Luke Short, who also collaborated on the screenplay with Harold Shumate and Lillie Heyward, but one of the aspects that make this an unusual Western is that the characters are morally ambiguous. Jim Garry (Robert Mitchum, top-billed and once again establishing his credentials as a truly masculine man – in the one film he and John Wayne made together, The Longest Day, it was all too obvious that Mitchum was the real butch one and Wayne the poseur) is your typical Western drifter, ending up in the middle of a range war. But it takes a while for the writers to make us aware which side of the war we should be on; Garry’s belongings are trampled by a herd of cattle belonging to John Lufton (Tom Tully), and Garry escapes being trampled only by quickly climbing up a tree. (Mitchum may have had a stunt double for the actual climb, but he was well known for doing things on screen other actors didn’t dare; while making The Longest Day he was supposed to be an officer leading a group of enlisted troops through the cold beach water. The actors playing the troops complained that the water was too cold, whereupon Mitchum walked into it and did the march himself, shaming all the other actors into doing it too.) I joked that, since the cattle drive had been preceded by a long scene of Garry taking off his leather boots, “I guess the cows wanted the boots back.” There’s a striking scene in which Garry finds himself being fired upon, and the person shooting at him is Lufton’s daughter Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes, who got screwed out of the major career she deserved when Howard Hughes took over RKO and fired her), which explains the slogan on the original advertising posters, “A Woman’s Bullet Kills as Quick as a Man’s!” While the two seem awfully free with their bullets – real Westerners carefully husbanded their ammunition since it was so hard to come by in those then-remote locations – Garry takes an understandable dislike to Amy, her father and the whole family.

He hooks up with an old friend named Tate Riling (Robert Preston) – one of the many oddly spelled names that abounded in Westerns of this period; it wasn’t until the film was almost over that I realized his last name wasn’t “Riley” – who’s trying to reclaim Lufton’s cattle. It’s only until quite late in the film that we realize Riling is the bad guy; he’s made a deal with a corrupt Indian agent, Jake Pindalest (Frank Faylen), to cancel Lufton’s deal to sell meat to the local reservation. With Lufton’s cattle inside the reservation while he’s on the outside, Riling figures he can get the government to confiscate the cattle, whereupon Pindalest will sell them to him for a cheap price. Riling has got the local homesteaders, including Kris Barden (Walter Brennan in a quite good “with” performance; directors working with Brennan for the first time often were asked by him, “Do you want it with or without?” When they quite naturally asked, “With or without what?,” Brennan would say, “Teeth”), to intervene on his side. One of the ironies of this movie is that it’s not until very late in the film that we actually see any Native Americans; we first see a collection of tipis on the reservation grounds and then meet Toma (Iron Eyes Cody, one of the few actually Native actors who got to play Natives on screen in the classic era), who like just about everybody else in the film has been tricked into intervening on Riling’s side. Fortunately, Garry is able to trick Pindalest into getting the government to extend Lufton’s deadline to move his cattle by a week, which gives Lufton and his family time to move the cattle off the reservation. Tipped off by Amy’s sister Carol (Phyllis Thaxter), who’s in love with him, Riling managed to get the cattle back onto the reservation, and in the process the cattle ran down and killed Kris Barden’s son. The Luftons don’t trust Garry even after Garry saves John Lufton’s life by killing two hit people Riling sent to kill him. Riling and Garry end up in a brawl in which Garry is wounded with a knife, and Amy Lufton nurses him back to health. Garry intuits that Riling will be coming back to finish them off and grab the cattle (ya remember the cattle?), and there’s a big gunfight in which Amy insists on staying and participating despite Garry’s telling her to go for her own safety. Ultimately Garry kills Riling and his henchmen, and rather than drift off into the West again, he agrees to stay behind, marry Amy, and live on the Luftons’ ranch.

Blood on the Moon (an odd title because there are no shots of the moon – Luke Short’s original novel was called Gunman’s Chance – and no visible blood, either, except for Garry’s knife wound) was directed by Robert Wise, who had risen from the ranks of Orson Welles’s editing room (he and Mark Robson, also a director later, co-edited Citizen Kane) and Val Lewton’s stunning production unit (Wise co-directed The Curse of the Cat People and had solo credits on Mademoiselle Fifi and The Body Snatcher). At one point the “suits” at RKO insisted that he be removed from the film and the more experienced Jacques Tourneur be put on it, but newly arrived RKO production chief Dore Schary insisted on keeping Wise on the film. Blood on the Moon is a quite dark story and it’s given an equally dark production; cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (who’d just come off filming Tourneur’s Out of the Past, which Eddie Muller – to my continuing irritation – keeps calling the quintessential film noir, a title I’d give to Murder, My Sweet) shoots almost the entire movie through red filters, which even during the daylight scenes gives a stark, contrasty look that adds to the story’s sense of foreboding doom. The score is composed by Roy Webb, whose contributions to film music history have been unjustly ignored because his scores were burned in a household fire in 1961 and Webb was so demoralized that he never composed again. Though one cue seemed a bit too close to “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” for my taste, most of Webb’s score fit well into the dark, atmospheric mood Wise and Musuraca were creating. While there are a few typical Hollywood lapses – in one scene Barbars Bel Geddes shows up after she’s supposedly been riding all night and her hair is perfectly permed (that one particularly got to my husband Charles, and I couldn’t help but recall the scene in the 1933 film King Kong in which Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray emerge from the jungle with their hair and clothes as disheveled as you’d expect from what we’ve seen them go through) – Blood on the Moon is a marvelous example of the so-called “psychological Western” that enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1950’s after the sensational successes of Winchester .73 and High Noon.