In the golden old days of Hollywood they made it good because they made it so damn believable. And that’s just what Robert Wise did with his 1948 western Blood on the Moon starring two Roberts in major roles.
Robert Mitchum as Jim Garry, a drifter from Texas, arrives in the small town of Sun Dust in the west in the middle of a conflict sitting atop a conspiracy plot cooked by Tate Riling (Robert Preston). Riling has his eyes on the herd of cattleman John Lufton (Tom Tully) and has a scheme to rope in Garry as well as one of Lufton’s own family. Much depends now on which side Garry’s gun point at while the drifter finds himself romantically drawn to Lufton’s daughter Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes).
While the movie’s storyline is not extraordinary for a western, the visual and dramatic elements are done to perfection. Robert Mitchum, for one, makes the perfect cowboy with a face and eyes effortlessly delivering the daring drifter’s mien in every single scene of his screen time. The introductory scene to his character showing him climbing a tree to evade the rush of the herd and later the epic bar fight with Riling are two of the most breathtaking moments in the story.
Wise’s Blood on the Moon stands on credibility, character, and casting. There are several dramatic turns and some heart-warming interactions along the course of the plot.
Interestingly the movie is categorized as a “Western film noir” on Wikipedia (at the time of this writing) with no defining noir elements visible to this reviewer other than the black and white cinematography that was actually the norm in filmmaking at the time. Garry is a character in charge of all his decisions without entrapment or necessity to be on the wrong side while his clean-hearted nature shows throughout the movie. It is classic western drama with a little mystery to Mitchum’s character. But the line separating it from a noir is as wide as the wild west itself.
