Blood on the Moon

 The Internet recommends this 1948 Western as a source for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. As usual, this plug is misguided and without merit.  I saw no similarities of any kind between Blood on the Moon and the Scorsese film.  Perhaps, somewhere Scorsese, who knows everything about all films, recommended this movie or remarked upon its peculiar film noir photography, but I didn't detect any allusions to this movie in Killers of the Flower Moon and, indeed, the style of the two pictures is very different.  (I'm puzzled about the Internet misrepresentation:  usually articles placed on the internet mentioning films have some economic motivation -- something is being sold.  But I can't figure out why a writer would encourage people to look up a forgotten 1948 picture except I suppose to promote rentals on Amazon Prime; it cost me $4.99 I think to watch this 88 minute picture.)

Blood on the Moon is directed by Robert Wise, a filmmaker who had worked with Orson Welles (he edited The Magnificent Ambersons) and Val Lewton (Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher.)  As a young director, he was thought to show promise, but didn't progress and, in fact, ended up as a hack albeit one that was very well-paid --  he ended up directing the film version of West Side Story and The Sound of Music.  Wise's movies, after some early low-budget successes, were largely inert Oscar-bait and most of his work is tedious.  This is true of Blood on the Moon as well -- the picture has an excellent cast including Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Taylor, but it isn't very interesting.  I can't define exactly what is wrong with this movie except to say that it seems overlong at 88 minutes notwithstanding its painfully complicated plot.  Despite gorgeous black-and-white photography and a really wonderful score -- the classic horse opera music is by Roy Webb   -- the film is dull with pointlessly elaborate night camerawork (completely unconvincing) and inexplicable plot twists. The movie's rear-projection work is terrible, almost as bad as Alfred Hitchcock but without master's dreamlike surrealism. 

A drifter, Jim Garry, played with weary nonchalance by Robert Mitchum, has lost his herd of cattle and wanders into a range war in Arizona.  A local cattle baron named Lufton has a contract to sell beef on the hoof to the Ute Indians confined on a reservation.  But Lufton has a rival named Riling (Robert Taylor)  This rancher conspires with a corrupt Indian agent to displace Lufton as beef supplier to the reservation and replace his animals with Riling's herd.  Riling has aligned himself with local small farmers and cattlemen, putting a popularist spin on his efforts to oust Lufton from the lucrative contract with the government.  At first, Garry rejects Lufton's efforts to engage him as a hired gun in the battle with Riling.  Garry has agreed, apparently previous to his appearance in the movie, to assist the villainous Riling.  Garry orchestrates a stampede that scatters Lufton's herd so that the animals can't be delivered in a timely manner to the Utes.  In the course of the stampede, the son of a small rancher named Bardon, played by Walter Brennan in a surprisingly dull performance, gets knocked off his horse and dragged to death.  This casualty opens Garry's eyes to the fact that he is working for the wrong side.  When Riling sends an assassin to murder Lufton and his comely daughter, Amy (Bel Geddes), Garry comes to their defense and switches sides.  This leads to further complications, particularly since Lufton's other attractive daughter, Carol, is having a Romeo-and-Juliet style fling with the evil Riling.  Riling seizes the hero, Garry, and detains him in the high Sierra in a vast, empty, and snowy landscape.  Meanwhile, Riling is planning to deliver his herd of cattle to the Utes and the corrupt Indian agent named Pindalest.  When Garry tries to escape, a renegade Ute knifes him in the belly and he nearly dies.  But he is rescued by Walter Brennan's character, Bardon, and brought to recuperate at his cabin located in a dark forest.  All the bad guys converge on Bardon's cabin and besiege it.  Garry is feverish and half comatose in the cabin, cared for by Amy and the old man.  After a prolonged siege and gun-battle, Garry suddenly recovers his wits and straps on his six-shooters.  He goes out into the forest, flanks the bad guys and guns them down.  Apparently, now, miraculously recovered, he struts across the ranch, proud of having slaughtered the villains.  Amy says that he's now a member of the family, essentially proposing to marry him.  Mitchum's Garry barely reacts, but, now, seems hale and hearty despite having been half-disemboweled ten minutes earlier.  Bardon, seemingly no longer in mourning for his son, decides the celebrate the betrothal by getting out a jug so everyone can get drunk.

The movie is not without its merits.  In the bleak opening scenes, Mitchum's cattle tramp rides through rough country in a rain storm and, when he camps and makes a fire, finds himself almost crushed to death by a stampede -- this is a herd of Riling's cattle coming down off the Sierra.  Mitchum scrambles up a tree to evade the maddened steers and we see the animals thundering by below.  Another stampede in which Mitchum drives Lufton's cattle across the plain causing the animals to scatter is thrillingly filmed and features the gory scene of Bardon's son being dragged to death by his horse. (I suspect this well-orchestrated action sequence was produced by a second-unit director). There are some reasonably good and tense encounters in a saloon and on the dusty main street of a local town.  For some reason, Wise stages most of the action at night, shooting "day for night" footage that is fairly unconvincing.  The final gunbattle in the forest looks like outtakes from Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- everything is blurry, velvet leaves, glistening shimmers of moonlight, and out-of-focus filigree of shadow.  It's pretty but the scene's isn't clear and hard to see.  Robert Mitchum's saddle tramp is Robert Mitchum who barely condescends to act at all.  Robert Taylor's Riling is smarmy and has a little pencil moustache like a fifties' car dealer -- he's pretty good but his part, like most of the movie, is underwritten. The women are essentially irrelevant. Bel Geddes looks good shouldering a long gun and she's introduced in the film engaging in an exchange of gunfire with the drifter, John Garry -- it's the sort of lurid meet-cute that would have pleased Sam Fuller, but some reason, this explosive and tawdry scene, doesn't really register.  The landscapes are wonderful -- we get shots of savage-looking mountains shrouded in black snow clouds and the action alternates between the snowy passes through the high country and desolate desert that looks like Monument Valley.  (Much of the movie was filmed in the high country at Sedona Crossing, before that place became a New Age tabernacle.)  I can't really explain why the movie doesn't work, but it's paced wrong and never very compelling. By the way, the movie's title is a  picturesque non sequitur and, in the best Hollywood tradition, has nothing to do with the plot.