Blood on the Moon

Yes. Agreed, Artler. That’s one great Western.

Mr. Flu, I’ll see if I can search out a copy of Sunset. I see it’s available for rental for 4 bucks. We’ll see.

Man with the Gun was not as good as Blood on the Moon, nor was it particularly Noir-ish, Western or otherwise. But it was certainly watchable.

I’ll give you some spoilers, but nothing of importance really. This is more of a formulaic Western so I do feel there’s much lost in giving away the formula. In fact, it’s similar indeed to High Plains Drifter: A town can’t or won’t defend itself. The bad guys wreak havoc. A good guy (or at least a mercenary) is given carte blanch to fix things. His “fix” often shocks the local population who soon want nothing more to do with him. Gee, after all, maybe the bad guys weren’t all that bad.

But Mitchum isn’t going away anytime soon. He has some they-killed-daddy issues to work out. (His unarmed father was shot down because someone else basically wanted his property.) That’s one reason he wears a gun. Two of them, in fact. They try to occasionally make this a psychological drama in this regard. And Mitchum does what he can in those times to give it some credence. But it’s merely the movie tipping its cap at the idea of a driven, perhaps manic, Mitchum. But it never does really go there. Mitchum is never anything but hard and determined, but never crazed.

There are many half-realized themes in this that if they were realized, this might have been a very memorable Western. For instance, the movie flirts with the idea that the girl who is engaged to the yute who — 1) gets shot in the shoulder, 2) then is kidnapped, 3) then is roughed up some more later in the film — is drawn to the more cool and stoic Mitchum. What girl wouldn’t be?

But they go nowhere with it. Mitchum is never tempted or taken with her at all. He’s too busy pining over the madam of the local whorehouse (or whatever it is in this movie…not a lot of whoring seems to be going on). And there is zero chemistry between Mitchum and Jan Sterling. it’s not a believable relationship on the face of it, underneath it, or right beside it either.



Much more Mitchum material is Barbara boom-boom Lawrence who plays one of the five or six “dancing” girls that we see who work for Jan Sterling. Besides looking good, she has a role in this at the end where the producers go out of their way to gin up a pretty dumb ending. The bad guys plan to use boom-boom as a distraction (by literally dropping a handkerchief at the right moment). I think by the end of many pictures they all just want to get it over with. I have no idea why they couldn’t think of something better.



But, of course, the world-hardened Mitchum isn’t going to fall for any trick like that and he doesn’t. But he does catch some lead from a different direction. But our hot-headed yute comes back into the picture and takes out the head honcho before he can kill Mitchum.

But it’s just a flesh wound, we come to understand. Or at least something he will easily recover from. After all, for a guy like Mitchum, taking lead is like another guy taking a bee sting. You just rub a little dirt on it and move on.

Interestingly, Mitchum took out Claud Akins very early in the film. I thought they would play that one up more. In fact, once he was deputized, Mitchum ran up a body count that would have made Clint Eastwood sit up and take notice. The clear highlight of the movie is when Mitchum goes on a rampage against the local gambling house which is owned by the chief bad guy (who we never see until the end…and I liked this aspect of it).