On a surface level Westerns and Film Noirs have very little in common. Noirs tend to take place inside the big city. Westerns are all about the wide open spaces of the American West. Noirs usually occur in the present, whereas westerns (almost by definition) occur in a specific past. Noirs are filmed in black and white. They revel in shadows and light. They take place in smoky little bars and grubby flats. Westerns make great use of the widescreen format and technicolor. Classic Westerns are about good versus evil; the differences are plain. Noirs live in the grey, the morally ambiguous, the dark nights of the soul.
It is that last bit that sometimes allows the two genres that seem so far apart to grow a little closer. While Classic Westerns often do present moral absolutes with clear good guys and bad guys, as the genre grew older it began to change. Their heroes were sometimes morally grey. They wrestled with complex questions. Dealt with complex characters. Etc. They started to feel a little more like noirs. Not always, of course, the vast majority of westerns stuck to their lane, but some of them, some of the best of them, allowed themselves into murkier territory.
Blood on the Moon is a Western Noir. It is set in the Old West, its characters are old cowboys, and its plot involves cattle and Indians, but its hero is flawed and its cinematography is pure noir.
Robert Mitchum plays Jim Garrey, a man down on his luck. When his old pal Tate Riling (Robert Preston) offers him a job he takes it, no questions asked. He soon learns he should have asked questions because Riling is up to some shenanigans.
The plot (or I should say Riling’s plot) is convoluted and too complicated to get into here. Basically, he’s setting some homesteaders against a rancher in hopes of making himself rich. He needs Garrey as a mediator to arrange a deal over some cattle.
That part of the plot doesn’t really matter. It boils down to Riley using Garrey for some pretty shading dealings. Garrey is basically a good man, but he’s done some bad things which makes him feel like a scoundrel. He’s left with a decision on whether to do the right thing and go against an old friend, or stay the course and get rich in the process.
Honestly, I got a bit lost in the machinations of the plot but Mitchum is great as usual and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca gets some great noir visuals out of his scraggly western landscape (and no wonder he shot a lot of great film noirs including Out of the Past and The Spiral Staircase). Preston seems a bit miscast to me. He’s great when he’s playing rascally con men, but he doesn’t quite exude the menace his character needs in this film.
Overall a decent example of both the Western and the film noir but there are better films in both genres.
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