(Joseph H. Lewis, US 1958, 80 min., 35mm)

A Swedish immigrant (Sterling Hayden) armed only with a whaling harpoon arrives in a small frontier community to fight for the rights of poor landowners and avenge the death of his father. The final showdown is a must-see! Then at 8:30 p.m. Blood on the Moon…

(Robert Wise, US 1948, 88 min., 35mm)

Robert Mitchum stars as Jim, a drifter hired by an old pal (Robert Preston) to extort money from innocent homesteaders. But when Jim’s conscience gets the best of him, the two men face a memorable final showdown in a dark barroom. Two films for one admission price.

This film appears as part of the Auteur Showdown series. Click here, To read more about auteur directors working in the western genre.
 
 

Program Notes

This “Auteur Showdown” double-feature pits Joseph H. Lewis, a B-movie camera poet nearing the end of his feature career, against Robert Wise, a former film editor gathering directorial momentum on his way to Oscar® winning big budget and big box-office road-show supremacy in the 1960s.

Joseph H. Lewis’ ingenious, atmospheric, and thoroughly entertaining pictures like My Name is Julia Ross, So Dark the Night, Gun Crazy, and The Big Combo, represent some of the most creative genre film work ever to emerge from Hollywood. Lewis might fairly be called the poverty row Jean Renoir. Like Renoir and William Wyler, a director whom Lewis studied carefully, according to his interview with Peter Bogdonavich in Who The Devil Made It, Lewis was a master of deep focus compositions, long takes, and intricate camera moves—devices that invariably served the film’s story and characters, not their creator’s ego.

As a nascent director, Joseph H. Lewis’ penchant for shooting through the spokes of the same prop in shot after shot earned him the nickname “Wagon Wheel Joe.” True to form, Terror in a Texas Town begins with a succession of shots foregrounded with furniture, banisters, water troughs, hitching posts and, yes, wagon wheels—mise-en-scene that visually defines and dramatically focuses the scene.

In his conversation with Bogdonavich, Lewis recalled that Terror in A Texas Town was shot in 10 days for a meager $80,000. While that economy is evident in the film’s threadbare sets (Hal Roach Studio’s TV Western backlot) and a recycled prologue, Terror in a Texas Town, deserves far better than the quasi-camp “harpoon vs. six-gun Western” status it seems to have acquired since its release on DVD.

In addition to lead Sterling Hayden, (whose loopy Swedish accent has likely contributed to Terror’s latter day down-market reputation), the cast is populated by a host of notable actors: Victor Millan, (the amorous shoe salesman in Welles’ Touch Of Evil); future familiar sitcom faces Sebastian Cabot (Family Affair’s butler Mr. French) and Hank Patterson, (Arnold the Pig’s “father” Fred Ziffel from Green Acres and Petticoat Junction); “Purple People Eater” singer and High Noon co-assassin Sheb Wooley; and finally, Nedrick “Ned” Young, who plays the one handed gunslinger Johnny Crale.

Though he wouldn’t receive proper credit until after his death in 1968, Young was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. He shared the Oscar® for Best Original Screenplay for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones under an assumed name the same year Lewis cast him in Terror in a Texas Town. Indeed, Town was itself written by Young’s fellow blacklistee Dalton Trumbo, similarly uncredited author of the original script for Lewis’ Gun Crazy.

In Blood On the Moon, director Robert Wise (aided considerably by RKO’s expert black and white cinematographer Nicholas Muscuraca) made a rare Western contribution to the pantheon of Hollywood B-films that used the darkly lit, eccentric angles characteristic of the UFA Studios in pre-war Germany as an inexpensive way to add value to a quick and cheap American production.

Though sometimes described as a “psychological western” like Raoul Walsh’s brooding Freudian 1947 oater Pursued, Blood On the Moon remains a straightforward and fast moving tale of greed, love, and betrayal during a range war. If there was a sole controlling idea behind the script (credited to former songwriter and future Disney live action film-scribe Lillie Hayward, along with Luke Short and Harold Shumate), it was probably that not a reel should go by without a gun fight, a stampede, or a showdown.

In Lee Server’s Robert Mitchum biography Baby I Don’t Care, director Wise gives much of the credit for a climactic saloon brawl’s verisimilitude to his leading man. “I wanted to avoid one of those extremely staged-looking fistfights used in all the movies, where the stuntmen did this elaborate acrobatic fighting and you saw the real actors only in close-ups,” Wise told Server. Instead, Wise wanted the punch-up to have “the awkward, brutal look of a real fight.” Mitchum, the director said, “knew exactly what I was going for. I think he probably knew more than I did about barroom fights like this one.”

Asked in an interview in the August 2006 issue of the magazine The Believer, what the most difficult aspect of filmmaking is, director Steven Soderbergh replied that, “the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything.” Like fellow cutting room graduates David Lean, Don Siegel, John Sturges, Phil Karlson, and Hammer studio’s Terrance Fisher, Robert Wise was a director with a robust gift for clarity. Blood On The Moon’s moody but lucid visual storytelling makes it one of the highlights of its director’s pre-blockbuster late-40’s films.

~Bruce Bennett