Giddy-up to the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Saturday, July 27, at 3 p.m. in celebration of National Day of the Cowboy as the Sedona Heritage Museum hosts its annual summer fundraiser with a locally-shot Western from the Golden Age of Hollywood: “Blood on the Moon.”
Robert Mitchum stars as a drifter cowboy who gets caught in a conflict between his smooth-talking friend played by Robert Preston and a group of homesteaders, with one of whom he ends up falling in love.
“Of the movies that writers and historians call ‘noir Westerns,’ none is more celebrated than 1948’s ‘Blood on the Moon,’” the University of New Mexico’s website states. “The co-mingling of the Western genre and the noir style crystalized in this extraordinary film, in turn influencing Westerns in the 1950s to become darker and more psychological.
“Produced during the height of the post-World War II film noir movement, ‘Blood on the Moon’ is a classic Western immersed in the film noir netherworld of double-crosses, government corruption, shabby barrooms, gun-toting goons and romantic betrayals.”
The film’s influence is still being felt in Hollywood, with director Martin Scorsese listing the movie as being among the major influences on his Oscar-nominated 2023 picture “Killers of the Flower Moon,” with the friendship between Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston’s characters inspiring the dynamic between Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s own work.
“There’s certainly twists and turns in ‘Blood on the Moon,’” Sedona Heritage Museum Executive Director Nate Meyers said. “There’s some suspense. There’s some thrills to it. There’s definitely intrigue of people playing one off another. And never revealing their true intentions until you get to the end.”
The screening will be preceded by a discussion of the film’s background and stories from behind the scenes, which will include the shooting of the scene where Mitchum’s character meets his love interest — played by Barbara Bel Geddes — at Red Rock Crossing.
“We’ll open it up as we do every year with a discussion about the filming here [and] get into how the director wanted the fight scene to seem realistic,” Meyers said. “And so they actually did not have stunt doubles. It was Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston actually duking it out over three full days because the director wanted them to look like they’d been beat up for film instead of using stunt doubles or makeup or anything, they were actually really beat up … [This] was actually Barbara Bel Geddes’ only leading role with this studio [RKO Pictures] because Howard
Hughes decided after this film that she didn’t have enough sex appeal, so he removed her from starring roles.”
Tickets for the Sedona Heritage Museum screening of “Blood on the Moon” are $20; to purchase tickets, call the Sedona International Film Festival Box office at (928) 282-1177.
