‘Blood on the Moon’
By Alan K. Rode
University of New Mexico Press, 136 pages

“Blood on the Moon” is part of the “Reel West” series, described by the publisher as “short, neatly packaged volumes exploring individual Western films across the whole history of the canon, from early and classic Westerns to revisionist and spaghetti Westerns.”

The film “Blood on the Moon” (1948) is often called a “noir Western,” and this book is one of the best examples of recent works that have energized both cinema study and group biography. Mr. Rode’s effort joins Alison Macor’s “Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation” and Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic.”

Director Robert Wise understood how to use Robert Mitchum’s surprising combination of lethality and lightheartedness, coupled with an understated delivery, to make the story of Jim Garry — caught between the machinations of an aspiring cattle baron (Robert Preston) and his stubborn adversary homesteader (Walter Brennan). 

Mitchum’s Garry is a drifter. When Mitchum first appeared on the set in a grungy get-up, Walter Brennan, a veteran of many Westerns and an amateur historian of the West, exclaimed: “That’s the goddamndest realest cowboy I’ve ever seen.” Fed up with pristine cowboys, Brennan appreciated Mitchum’s grittiness in a film that rejected Hollywood hokum and presaged more authentic portrayals of the West.

Garry remains, nonetheless, a Hollywood hero, decent enough to seek redemption when he could just as easily have become nothing more than a killer. As Mr. Rode explains, the film capitalized on Mitchum’s romantic appeal as a “bad boy.” After serving a sentence at the Wayside Honor farm for marijuana possession, Mitchum said it was “Palm Springs without the riffraff.”

Mitchum took his work seriously, nonetheless, and delivered line-perfect performances. On screen and off he seemed enigmatic, and his portrayal of Jim Garry is enhanced by his embodiment of a character who does not want to give too much of himself away in a world of double crosses and corruption.  

A film is by nature a collaborative enterprise, but just how much the directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, composers, art directors, and set designers contribute to the making of a great film, and in what proportion, cannot be understood within the limits of an essay, or even in a full length biography, because, of necessity, the biographer has to move on to other films and phases of a subject’s life.

Mr. Rode has examined the RKO production notes, Robert Wise’s laserdisc commentary, and, it seems, every other piece of evidence that makes him seem better informed than even the consummate Wise, who, we learn, did painstaking pre-production research and preparation on site in locations that were difficult to film, sometimes in poor weather conditions.

Hollywood has often been called a factory, and it is true, as Mr. Rode shows, that directors like Wise were company men and did as they were told, even when it meant hacking away at Orson Welles’s masterpiece, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” when Wise was still a film editor.

Yet within the studio regimen, it is remarkable how much filmmakers like Wise remained their own men — though it is not just men who made the pictures. Also requiring Mr. Rode’s attention is the tightly written script by Lillie Hayward, who faithfully adapted Luke Short’s much admired novel.

Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca is given full credit for lighting that enhances the ambiguities of character and setting that brought a new complexity to the Western, using a “complete tonal range of black and white.”

Alan K. Rode is just about the perfect writer for the “Reel West” series, with biographies of noir standout Charles McGraw and legendary director Michael Curtiz. Almost every sentence, especially in the beginning of Mr. Rode’s book, is packed with the Hollywood history that bears upon “Blood on the Moon.” 

In such a short compass, we have it all: the development of Westerns, gangster pictures, and film noir, the writers, directors, technicians, and studio heads — in this case the loony Howard Hughes.

Film is a corporate enterprise, and Mr. Rode, director and treasurer of the Film Noir Foundation, understands the institutional and business side of filmmaking very well. 

Mr. Rollyson is the editor of the Hollywood Legends series, University Press of Mississippi, and the author of “A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan.”