Blood on the Moon (Reel West)

Type
Book
Authors
ISBN 10
0826364691 
ISBN 13
9780826364692 
Category
Film Criticism  [ Browse Items ]
Publication Year
2023 
Pages
136 
Subject
Film noir; Film noir- United States- History and criticism; Western films; Western films- United States- History and criticism 
Abstract
Of those movies categorized as "Noir Westerns" by writers and historians, Blood on the Moon is at the top of the list. Produced during the height of the post-World War II film noir movement, the picture transplanted the dark urban environs of the city into the western iconography. Instead of being framed in a Monument Valley sunset, Robert Mitchum's lone horseman opens the picture as a solitary figure in a dark rainstorm as the Arizona trail replicates the rain slicked streets of Los Angeles. Mitchum's existentialist character of Jim Garry is at odds with the traditional Western hero. Labeled as a "loose rider," he possesses nothing but a borrowed cattleman's outfit. Garry's loyalties shift during his sojourn in an alienist domain where things are assuredly not what they initially seem. The chiaroscuro lighting during the claustrophobic interior scenes and those at nighttime (comprising nearly half the film) depict isolated faces bathed in a stream of light against a black background. Blood on the Moon is a classic western immersed in the film noir netherworld of double crosses, government corruption, shabby barrooms, gun toting goons and romantic betrayals. Blood on the Moon was the first" A" picture directed by thirty-four-year-old Robert Wise (The Set Up, The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Want to Live, Odds Against Tomorrow, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles). 
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