Film review: Blood on the Moon (1948)

This is an excellent little flick, although not especially noir (it's also in the "Western Noir" collections).  I imagine it got so classified (a) because of the title (which is pretty much irrelevant), (b) because it has Robert Mitchum, and (c) because of the cinematographer, who also worked on the pretty-much-perfect Mitchum film noir Out of the Past, and who favors a lot of inky shadows.  In fact, sometimes it's hard to see what's going on. 

Mitchum plays a proto-version of an Eastwood Man With No Name drifter type (who, in fact, says several times that he will drift, as in move on), and has a great entrance, backlit at night in the pouring rain.  He sets up camp but is promptly overrun by cattle, who drive off his horse and trample his fire and boots, which he'd just removed to empty the water out of.  Their driver appears, and after challenging him brusquely, takes him to his camp, where we meet the leader of one of the two factions of the film, Cattle rancher Tom Tully.  He explains his situation: he used to keep his cattle on the Indian reservation, and sell his beef to the Indians, but a new government go-between (the weasly Jake Pindalest) has just informed him that his beef is no longer any good, and furthermore he has to get his cattle off the reservation by a certain date.  But when he tried to move them to nearby grazing lands that he used to use before the reservation, he finds that they have been settled by homesteaders, who are being organized by the other main faction, Tate Riling (played, in an early role, by Robert Preston, who would go on to fame as the titular Music Man).  What's worse, Riling has been recruiting hired guns, which explains why they were so wary of Mitchum's Jim Garry.  Tully tries to recruit Garry, but he says he'll drift instead.  But he does agree to deliver a message to Tully's daughters on the way into town.  When Garry tries to cross the river, somebody shoots at him.  He sneaks round behind them and discovers that it's a young woman (played by Barbara Bel Geddes, who would go on to play the matriarch "Miss Ellie" in Dallas, and is quite recognizable). 

To teach her a lesson, he shoots her boot heel off - oddly, something that happened in yesterday's film The Naked Spur.  Was this a thing?  When he arrives at the Tully place, of course he finds out that she's one of the daughters, but she arrives after he's given the note to the other one.  Then he goes into town, and after some shenanigans where a hired gun, who thinks Garry works for Tully, tries to pose as Riling, little knowing that Garry knows Riling, Garry and Riling are re-united, and Riling explains why he summoned Garry.

Turns out, the whole "organizing the downtrodden homesteaders to protect their rights" thing is a sham: he and Pindalest have cooked up a deal where Pindalest drives Tully off the reservation and Riling stops him leaving, so that he will have to offload his cattle for a song (to avoid forfeiting them for nothing) at which point Riling will sell them to the government for the usual price, and Riling and Pindalest (and Garry, if he helps) will make out handsomely.  (No kidding: Tiling offers Garry $10 grand to help -  that would be small fortune in those days.)  Garry doesn't like the idea, but he's desperate: he tried ranching but all his cattle died of a fever.  What's more, Tiling has been seducing the non-shooting Tully daughter, and she passes on the note that Garry delivered, which says where Tully will be crossing the river (to get his cattle off the reservation).  Garry sees her do it, though.  And what's more, when Tiling and his men show up there, Tully has faked them out.  It's not clear whether he expected Garry to read the note or if he knows his daughter is leaking info, but Riling's men eventually manage to stampede Tully's cattle back on to the reservation.  But (if you're still with me), Garry decides that he can't take Riling's evil any more and, after a fight with Riling, switches sides.  There are more twists and turns - it's a very tightly plotted film, which is part of what I like about it.  Oh, and it also has Walter Brennan, he of the archetypal old-geezer-in-a-Western voice, so what are you waiting for?  Check it out!