Long before her days as the noble but strong willed Miss Ellie on "Dallas" and with a stage career not yet legendary, Barbara Bel Geddes scored brief success in films. She scored an Oscar nomination as the "I" who "Remembered Mama" and got all tough with Robert Mitchum in this film noir western. When first seen, she's shooting at Mitchum, purposely missing but with intent of scaring him away. He shoots back, basically knocking her down, but when next seen, she knocks the hat off his head with a single shot, leaving him hiding the fact that he's petrified. Obviously, there are sparks, but Bel Geddes won't be putting down her rifle anytime soon as she deals with the corruption of fear mongering Robert Preston who uses Mitchum in his scheme to forge locales to sell him their cattle.
While plots like this have turned up in westerns ever since the creation of the genre, never had it been done with such a psychological darkness. Film noir had been around for a few years and elements of the darkness at dawn under a western moon were turning up in westerns, most notably in "Pursued", a western thriller that Mitchum had made the year before. Robert Wise, a former film editor who added noir elements into the horror genre, now did the same thing here, and the results are successful, if not completely satisfying. Shadows in the snow this could have been called, with Preston a very subtle villain and Tom Tully and Phyllis Thaxter are very good as the father and sister whom Bel Geddes has toughened up to protect. Walter Brennan is also aboard as a local wise man who provides a moral guide for the developers characters.
So how does, exactly, a standard western plot become film noir? The psychological degradation of seemingly decent characters, others having to take steps to bring the evil forces down by reaching into their own psyche, and anti-heroes who keep so much inside. Moody photography, a screenplay that goes deeper into the darkness inside all mankind, and a direction that moves the camera around like it was reading everybody's minds and often became the standing replacement where a character was speaking from. This genre hit its height with "The Furies" two years later, but "Blood on the Sun" successfully reveals the important elements that make film noir tick, western or not, and would be a great guide to filmmakers of the future.
While plots like this have turned up in westerns ever since the creation of the genre, never had it been done with such a psychological darkness. Film noir had been around for a few years and elements of the darkness at dawn under a western moon were turning up in westerns, most notably in "Pursued", a western thriller that Mitchum had made the year before. Robert Wise, a former film editor who added noir elements into the horror genre, now did the same thing here, and the results are successful, if not completely satisfying. Shadows in the snow this could have been called, with Preston a very subtle villain and Tom Tully and Phyllis Thaxter are very good as the father and sister whom Bel Geddes has toughened up to protect. Walter Brennan is also aboard as a local wise man who provides a moral guide for the developers characters.
So how does, exactly, a standard western plot become film noir? The psychological degradation of seemingly decent characters, others having to take steps to bring the evil forces down by reaching into their own psyche, and anti-heroes who keep so much inside. Moody photography, a screenplay that goes deeper into the darkness inside all mankind, and a direction that moves the camera around like it was reading everybody's minds and often became the standing replacement where a character was speaking from. This genre hit its height with "The Furies" two years later, but "Blood on the Sun" successfully reveals the important elements that make film noir tick, western or not, and would be a great guide to filmmakers of the future.