Watched another moving Western noir on Criterion … “Blood on the Moon,” based, apparently, on a novel by Luke Short. From 1948, it stars Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Gedes. I hadn’t realized Mitchum was considered, per Roger Ebert, “the soul of film noir.” He was persuasive in the morally complex role of Jim Garry. Overall, the film is a bit clunky, but I found ample compensation in its atmospherics and ingenuous devotion to the Western “mythology.” Bel Gedes is an earnest, attractive love interest.
Noir elements come out in the play of shadow, darkness, gloom and doom that pervade the fight scenes, and in the treacherous allegiances that Mitchum’s character must navigate.