Blood on the Moon (1948)
My viewing habits have been all over the place since I started self-isolating with my husband. Early on, I cycled through HBO miniseries and recent releases, with Babylon 5 episodes sprinkled throughout. (I’m still working through Babylon 5, very slowly; I have at least one essay about the show gestating somewhere deep inside my brain.) I talked about rewatching all my comfort-in-crisis movies. (I haven’t, except for Aliens and a recent viewing of Mad Max: Fury Road.) Somewhere in late April, my brain broke open. I joined a film-watching group programmed by a friend of a friend who projects for Doc Films, and I started watching whatever was nearest at hand during my spare time. This has led to a lot of strange viewing choices, some familiar, some I’d never heard of before.
I suppose I’ve accepted that, at least in the U.S., we’re in this for the long haul. I’ve accepted that we won’t be having friends over to our new apartment for drinks for a long, long time. I’m both devastated and resigned; I miss seeing people, and I don’t know how to plan for the future. So I watch whatever occurs to me, or whatever was last suggested to me: Lord of the Rings and The Watermelon Woman and Yojimbo and Palm Springs and Hamlet 2000 and Blade II and The Old Guard. Fortunately, my husband has good taste, and we have access to a good variety of streaming services. Even when we’ve been at a loss for what to watch, we’ve had plenty of options. (Our full list is here—I update it every time I watch something new, and will until we crawl our of our isolation hole for the last time.)
Tonight’s option was one I wasn’t familiar with at all. Criterion released a series of Western Noir films a few weeks ago. Josh wanted to watch something from the mid-20th-century, and I remembered that one of the movies in the series starred Robert Mitchum and had an interesting name, something to do with the moon and with blood. Maybe it’s the cyclical turn of anger and despair and impotent rage, maybe the name just sounded poetic. We queued it up and agreed that at least if it were bad, it was only ninety minutes long.
I’m not surprised that this movie isn’t well-remembered. It isn’t bad—there are some memorable lines, and the shots of Robert Mitchum’s moon face and dark, hulking body skulking in the shadows are memorable—but neither is it particularly striking. There are cattle stampedes, cross-cut between over-cranked action and back-projected shots of tossing heads and horns. There are standoffs and bar fights and blood feuds, and a few trick shots, and always the sound of hoofbeats, retreating or approaching. The action scenes blend together, even though they’re short and ugly and more taken with punching than with gunfire. Much of the film feels like a shadow of the technicolor Westerns that would follow it.
But I appreciated this movie. There are interesting seeds sown here, both in the genre cliches and in the surprising story choices. The plot is consumed with a capitalist grift—ranchers and crooked businessmen, trying to screw each other over, or else trying to avoid being screwed, all at the expense of the residents of an Indian reservation, and all paid for by the U.S. government liaison. Our hero is a lone hero, but he’s caught in the teeth of the scheme before he fully understand his situation, and he spends the rest of the film trying to escape his plight, and then to try to use the systems that have trapped him (his handshake contract, his word, and the government terms of sale for cattle) to rescue others from their own troubles as well. Our hero falls in love with a ranch girl named Amy, but she isn’t helpless or weak. She too is caught up in the grift, because the cattle at the heart of it belong to her father. She’s devoted to the men in her life, and unfortunately somewhat flat, but she isn’t defined by the skirts she wears at home nor by the breeches she wears when she’s out riding and shooting. In one memorable shot, she’s crouched at the window of a cabin, rifle in hand, the moonlight streaming through the glass she broke so she could get a better shot. Robert Mitchum lies wounded in bed behind her. It’s an interesting reversal of the damsel in distress, and all the more striking when considered alongside shots from The Night of the Hunter a few years later. Lillian Gish sits guard in a house full of children, her own head framed by a window and a rifle across her knees, singing a hymn in tune with the stalker outside played by Robert Mitchum.
Barbara Bel Geddes and Robert Mitchum in Blood on the Moon
RKO Pictures
Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter
United Artists
