The Extras - Noir Western "Blood on the Moon" with author Alan K. Rode

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Author Alan K. Rode joins the podcast to discuss his new book BLOOD ON THE MOON, a detailed look at the making of the 1948 western.  Our discussion takes a deep dive into how this film is a  prime example of a noir western, which was a movement in westerns toward realism after World War II.  Alan provides background on star Robert Mitchum and why he was a perfect fit for this noir western style.  We also discuss the great director Robert Wise, cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca and the other members of the production team.  And then in turn we discuss stars Robert Preston, Barbara Bel Geddes, Phyllis Thaxter, Walter Brennan, and Charles McGraw.  We end with an update from George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive, as to why the film never received a DVD release, and the work that went into bringing it out on Blu-ray in early 2020.Alan K. Rode's webpagePurchase on Amazon:Book - Blood on the MoonBlood on the Moon Blu-rayThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify Warner Archive Store on Amazon Support the podcast by shopping with our Amazon Affiliate linkDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and they're released on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. And today I'm very excited to have author Alan K. Rohde back on the podcast.

And most of you will remember Alan is a great film historian, cinema impresario, and the author of Michael Curtiz, A Life in Film. And he is acknowledged as one of the foremost authorities on the films of Michael Curtiz. And that's why we love to have him on the podcast. And as some of you may remember, he recently was on to talk about the classic Casablanca in November with George Feltenstein. So for those of you who haven't listened to that episode, check that one out. That's a terrific episode. And then also he was on to talk about Angels with Dirty Faces. And then last year we discussed more Hollywood and his Arthur Lyons film festivals. We'll briefly talk about an update to those for this year as well at the end of our discussion here.

But today we're talking about his new book, Blood on the Moon, which releases on March 1st. Hi, Alan. Good to talk with you today. Tim, it's great to be back and talking about movies again. And I'm very excited about this new book. So thanks for having me on. Yeah, I was just looking back at some of the discussions we had. And when we had the discussion about Noir Hollywood last, I think last April, that we talked about that, I did ask you about what some projects you had going in the works. And you mentioned this book among others that you're working on.

But every book, of course, has a long journey. And no author begins that journey without probably a lot of thought about, you know, do I want to invest a year or two, whatever it's going to take to do this book? So what kind of led you down the path to writing this book about this great 1948 Western starring Robert Mitchum? Well, I'd like to say this is kind of my COVID book, because when we were all shuttered down and no one could go anywhere in the throes of COVID, I decided to write this book. And I guess from a contextual point of view, if Michael

Curtiz's Life in Film was a symphony that took a long time for me to write, this is more of a concerto. It's slightly under 200 pages and the focus is on one movie. But what really intrigued me about it is that it's a movie that always struck me as one of the first Westerns that co-mingled the film noir style that became all the rage in Hollywood or the film noir movement after World War II with the American Western. And it was kind of, I think, a forerunner of that as the Western genre really changed, in my opinion, into the 1950s with the Anthony Mann, Jimmy Stewart Westerns and so on and so forth. So as I write in the book, you know, Mitchum, who opens the film riding on a Arizona trail in Sedona in the rain, he could have had a fedora on and he could have been walking down

an alley of downtown LA. And very similar plot lines where things aren't what they seem to be and people aren't what they seem to be and the stranger coming into town and all kinds of different things happen. So there's a lot of that. The other thing that I thought was very interesting about the film is that it was written by the guy that was eventually dubbed the Dean of Western Writers, Luke Short, and his real name was Frederick Clinton. And it was his first book that was adapted into a movie. And I think at least eight of his novels and his short stories were adapted into Westerns by Hollywood. And he had the style that was kind of the perfect three-act style and the characterization. characterization. And there's a lot of similarities between the noir sensibility and Luke Short's writings that I found to be striking. So there was that. Another attribute that intrigued me, this was the first A film directed by the great Robert Wise. And what I did in the book is it allowed me to trace Wise's career back to his earliest days when he was humping film cans on the loading

dock of RKO in the 1930s, and then moved up to a job in the sound department. And one of his first jobs was editing in the beeps of the RKO tower for the RKO tower that opened the films as it switched from radio pictures to RKO pictures and so forth. So you also have the whole history of RKO, which is one of Hollywood's most unusual and most chaotically managed studios, for lack of a better term. And then, of course, there's Robert Mitchum, who became a star almost in spite of RKO. And this was a first one of his early major roles. And also what happened to Hollywood and RKO due to the blacklist, which happened right around this time, right after the movie was completed, before it was released, Mitchum got busted for pot.

before it was released. Mitchum got busted for pot. And then Howard Hughes bought RKO, and he turned it into kind of a obsessive play thing for his obsessions. So you had all these different historical and thematic forces centered around this movie. And I think I was able to kind of homogenize all of this into a very interesting story about the movie, how it was made. And I also got access to all the production records. I was also fortunate to get access to Luke Short's papers, which are, and I should say Frederick Clinton's papers at the University of Oregon, and was able to get those very easily and all of his correspondence with his agents and the studios and so forth. So I was able to drill down really deep into this, which is my modus operandi anyway, when

I write about things. So I feel good about the book. And I think it tells a story not only about the movie and westerns and film noir, but also about the changing cultural forces after World War II that changed Hollywood as well. Yeah, and this is only, what, a year or two removed from Out of the Past, which is an all-time classic of noir. And then this comes out. So it's very early in Mitchum's career. And I'm assuming you're a huge Mitchum fan and his Knorr work. Oh, yeah.

Mitchum was, there was nobody like him. And what's really amazing is that he became such a kind of a talisman of post-war cool on American movie screens that it's interesting to consider that in the 1940s, the general public considered marijuana to be a dangerous drug. Mitchum, when he got caught, and I go into that whole case in great detail, he was portrayed sympathetically as maybe he was a drug addict, you know, because he liked to smoke pot. And and initially tried to fix the case. And when he couldn't fix it, he got him the best lawyer in town. And Mitchum ended up pleading guilty and got probation. But he had to do, I think, 90 days in the county farm, which was up in Kistig,

which very ironically, several months earlier, he had been riding horses for Blood on the Moon and being felled by Robert Wise right near where he was incarcerated shortly thereafter. But my point being that Mitchum had so much attraction on screen that people kind of forgave him for this. You know, he had the sympathetic press releases and he got his family around lawyers, and Howard Hughes, and all of that stuff, which certainly helped. But really what enabled him to overcome this and be forgiven is that people loved the way he appeared on screen as kind of the laconic, sheepish rogue with a heart of gold, which is exactly what he plays in Blood on the Moon. So I think that the fact that his career and the pot bust made him even more popular was really kind of a fulcrum point in American culture, where previously Hollywood personages that were

involved in scandal involving drugs and so on and so forth, that had been a career ender. And of course, Howard Hughes could have tossed Mitchum on the Hollywood scrap heap. But instead of that, he was very loyal to him, helped him buy a house, hired lawyers, did all those things. And I think I'm not a dime store psychologist, but I think in his heart, I think Howard Hughes wanted to be Robert Mitchum, to be that carefree guy that wasn't obsessed with germs on his hands and communists working for him that could go through life having any woman he wanted and being a devil may care thing. And Hughes really was loyal to Mitchum. And Mitchum stuck around RKO. Mitchum. And Mitchum stuck around RKO. He could have forced his way out, but he fulfilled his contract. Acting in, at the time, were not a lot of good and great movies. I mean, we look back at

those movies now, and I'm very fond of them, but they were not great movies by any stretch of the imagination. But Mitchum repaid that loyalty, even though his use became more and more reclusive and secretive and weird. Mitchum, who loved nicknames, called Howard Hughes the Phantom. That was his nickname for Howard, you know, the Phantom. But the whole relationship between the two of them is something I go into in the book. And it's highly entertaining and highly unusual. And I just rewatched the, uh, the Blu-ray release. We should talk about that briefly.

It did come out from the Warner archive in, uh, April of 2020. And it looks, looks really good. They, they did a terrific job of remastering that for the Blu-ray. And I mean, it's, it's terrific. It's like you said, the first scene, you know, in terms of filmmaking, you always want to start in the middle, right? You don't want to start at the beginning. You want to start in the middle. And that first scene, you see it, he's in the rain, he's all by himself. And then this stampede is happening. You immediately are drawn in. You're like, okay, where am I? What's going on? It's a terrific start to the

movie and just a lot of fun. And as you say, it's got all of those elements. It's got the two ladies and you don't know which one at first is the good one and which ones that he's going to fall for in a way. Oh yeah. And you have a romantic triangle. You have a friend who is Mitchum's buddy, who is duplicitous, who has actually summoned him, but you don't know that right away. And then you have a lot of betrayal. And the town there, excuse me, I have a cold. The town there, Sundust, which I love the name of that town, Sundust. Yeah. And it perfectly sets the setting at shabby bars, deserted streets. They filmed, Wise filmed a lot of this at night.

A lot of the film was shot in Sedona during the winter, which was the worst time. And they had a terrible time chasing clouds and rain all over the Sedona Valley. And that's part of the story of Wise. He said that he got three weather reports, one from LA, one from the National Weather Service, another one, and he said they never agreed with one another and they were never right. So they'd go to one place and it would be raining, and then they'd say, well, let's go someplace else. And then they tried to film in the rain. And it really, it sent the cost of the film up through no fault of his own. But in going through the production reports, it was very interesting to see how he persevered under circumstances. And the other thing is, persevered under circumstances. And the other thing is, is he chose really one of the outstanding noir cinematographers in Nicholas Moussaraka, who was a master of light and shadow, who filmed

most of the Val Lewton movies, who filmed Out of the Past, a whole plethora of noirs. And Moussa Raqqa had been at RKO before Joe Kennedy bought the studio in the 20s. I mean, he started as a driver for the silent film mogul, J. Stuart Blaxton, then a clapper loader, and he worked his way up. And he was a superb director of photography, and Wise chose him for that, what Wise called that dark and shady look that he wanted. So Wise very directly made Blood on the Moon look like a film noir, both in terms of plot and both in terms of the visual cast of the movie as shot by Nick Musaraka. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases.

So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. Yeah, it's terrific fun. I'm a big fan of Westerns as well, and a big fan of noir. So when I saw the, you know, and I know you, of course, are an expert in the noir genre. So when I saw this book, I'm like, wow, this is terrific. It's a great blend. And is there kind of a subgenre, as you were saying, of Western and noir? Yeah, I think there is. I think there is. I mean, one of the cliches that I will always try out is noir-like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, because I don't think it's a genre. I think it's a style or an unconscious movement of post-World War I. And you can trace it back to different films like The Maltese Falcon

or Stranger on the Third Floor. And then you can go into the 30s of proto-noir. And, you know, people have gotten their doctoral dissertations writing about all this stuff. But I think there was definitely, and I write about this in the book. There was definitely a dividing line at some point between the Western of the good guys and the bad guys. And it was very, very clearly defined. And I think after the war, the war really changed everything. It changed people. It changed how you perceive the world. It changed people. It changed how you perceive the world. Women either served or went to work. It was just such a cultural sea change. And I think that this movie and other post-World War II movies reflect that. more people like Mitchum, who has his own standard code of conduct. Now, just to Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely, where he, Philip Marlowe says, what I needed was, you know, money in the bank, a home in the country and something or other. But he said, what I had was a hat, a coat and a gun. You know, what Mitchum has in this movie starting out is he has a horse, a saddle, and his kit tied behind him.

And then the movie is like five minutes old and he loses all of that. Yeah. He has to start all over again. And he's trying to figure out what the hell is going on because he got sent for and he's immediately being suspected. And you find out later that he's the people who helped him. He's lying to them at the beginning of the movie. And you don't find out really what the hell is he doing there and so on as he goes into town

and Charles McGraw and a bunch of goons try and kill him. And the other thing is, is it really, I think the movie also brings in the theme of government corruption. You know, the government in the cops and robbers movies and the early cowboys movies was viewed as a force of good. Well, in this movie, you have Frank Phelan as a totally corrupt federal Indian agent in cahoots trying to rip off Tom Tully and drive him off the land. And then they enlist all these farmers that are a bunch of real being fooled into thinking that they're defending their land when they're really part of a gigantic fraud. And I think this is a very modern look for its time about how government is not necessarily always a good thing

at all, and that people, that police and officials can be corrupt and crooked and so on and so forth. And so I think there's some of that, which I think is kind of a more modern take on the traditional Western. And as you see the Westerns that evolve, when you see even the work of John Ford, I mean, compare the work of the searchers. And as Ford went along, very, you know, John Wayne's really racist, hard-bitten hero, you wouldn't see that in the 1940s. And as the war ended, the wartime diversions of, you know, Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy, sitting down with Louis Stone, bearing his heart over a $10 restaurant bill he can't pay, or John Hall and Maria Montez dashing around the Universal

backlot in Arabian Nights costumes. All of that kind of fantasia really went away after the war ended. And I think Americans wanted more realism. They still wanted to be entertained, musicals and so forth. But as far as drama goes, you started seeing more movies like Crossfire, Gentleman's Agreement, Home of the Brave, stuff that identified anti-Semitism, racism, all of this serious stuff. And you never would have seen movies like this being made before or even during the war to a certain respect. So I think Blood in the Moon was really in the vanguard of the Western genre being changed by cultural forces. And then, of course, the censors trying to get something on screen that showed, I'll take the fight scene in the movie between Robert Preston and Mitchum in a darkened saloon. Mitchum in a darkened saloon. Robert Wise staged this, and this was one of the, in my opinion,

realistic movie fights of two desperate men in a darkened saloon. And of course, Moussa Raqqa looked like he lit it with birthday candles. But you can still see the principles, but it's like the light gets shot out and they're fighting in the dark and it's two desperate men. And the censors tried to do everything to kill that scene. They could change it in such a way that it would have resembled a Bowery Boys or Three Stooges, you know, eye poking contest. And to the credit of Wise and Musaraka, they were, and RKO, they were able to mollify the censors and get something really good on screen. And Joseph Breen, who was the chief censor, after World War II, he knew, I think, that he was fighting a losing battle on trying to keep adult themes off of movie screens. So that's the other thing I bring into the book, how the public consciousness and the

appreciation for adult entertainment had changed. And the censors were still trying to enforce a production code that was concentrated in 1929 and 1930 and 1948. So Breen and the censor's office was still fighting the battle, but I think they were losing the war at the same time. Gradually. Right. Well, I'm just going to hold up here for those watching on YouTube, but I'm going to hold up here the cover. And I was just looking at it and, and we haven't really talked too much about the two female leads here,

but it says a woman's bullet kills as quick as a man's. And of course, that's referring to the character of Amy, who is really a sharpshooter, I guess. You know, she's got she's a great shot, right? Played by Barbara Bell. Yeah, you know, that that is just the typical studio publicity catch line. It has absolutely zero really to do with the film, except I'll say that the Amy character is the spine of the movie because she and Mitchum encounter each other and it's this amusing shooting at each other and he drives her into the river there in Sedona and so forth. And of course,

as I refer to it, Mitchum really finds his true north in Amy. But Amy's tough. I mean, the rancher had two daughters instead of two sons. And one's involved with Robert Preston duplicitously, and Amy's the other one. And she ends up falling for Mitchum because she realizes the truth of Mitchum's character. And I think the way their relationship evolves is very an adult type of thing. It's not hackneyed or corny. I think it's handled very well. And I think Barbara Bel Geddes was a really superb actress. I think she was nominated the same year for Best Supporting Actress in I Remember Mama.

really liked. And in typical Howard Hughes fashion, when he took over after about a month, he told Sherry to fire her because she did not meet the requirements of what a female movie star should be. In other words, Howard Hughes didn't like the shape of her body, so he should get rid of her. And also that Sherry should quit making Battleground, which was his pet project. And Hughes said, no one cares about World War II movies. It has to be about communism. So Sherry knew that working for Hughes was a non-starter. He quit. And then he went to work, took Battleground to MGM, where it won Academy Awards and was one of MGM's top movies of the year. And Barbara Bel Geddes went on to a distinguished career. But she was a very, very accomplished actress. She was not a good rider, though. So when they were in Sedona, she got a very, very sore posterior

from having to learn how to ride horses. And for those who look very closely at the beautiful Warner Brothers Blu-ray, which I recommend, it's a great transfer. You'll see a lot of times Wise would cut away from her getting on and off a horse because I think she was having a tough time with that. She had a much easier time manning a Winchester rifle than she did. Right. Well, I thought Phyllis Thaxter also was terrific. And, uh, I mean, I, I think she's in what, uh, breaking point. Is that right? With John Garfield that last year? Yeah. Yeah. She was a really underrated actress. Uh, she was a stage actress like Bel Geddes. And she was signed, and I believe her first part was in 30 Seconds Over Tokyo at MGM as Van Johnson's wife. And she got kind of typecasted

as the loyal wife, you know, act of violence, a really great noir at MGM directed by Fred Zinnemann. She's Robert Ryan's wife, and he's like this tortured former prisoner of war, stalking Van Heflin, who's a traitor. And she's running behind him, trying to stop him from ruining himself by getting revenge. And she always played this. So this role for Thaxter was really kind of a departure in that she played a woman that actually was, and I guess there's a lot of spoilers we're throwing out here, but she plays a good-hearted woman who's basically led astray and betrays her family unknowingly.

And I think it's a really good turn. And, of course, her turn as John Garfield's wife in The Breaking Point, I think, is one of the great unheralded performances of a woman in noir. She's absolutely believable and superb in that role. So she was a great actress. She ended up marrying Jim Aubrey, who infamously dismembered MGM. I think he was the head of CBS. And they used to call Albrey the smiling cobra in terms of his management style.

But be that as it may, Thaxter was a great actress. And she did a lot of very good Alfred Hitchcock presents during the 1950s that I've seen. She was a very, very good actress. All the actors in this movie, I mean, you have Walter Brennan, for God's sakes, who by 1948, Walter Brennan had been in over 100 movies. He had done or seen anything possible on a location or a movie set. He's got some great lines inles mcgraw wearing a bearskin coat with that voice in fact robert why robert why said charlie mcgraw that bearskin coat and that voice were just such a perfect match and uh the guy that did the wardrobe for blood on the moon was a fellow

named jim delong who was a real expert on period Western costumings. He did Shane, he did some of the DeMille Western movies, and was really, really excellent. And Wise picked him. And a story that Wise likes to tell about this movie is that the first day of shooting, Mitchum walks in the set, and he's dressed as a cowboy with the bandana, chaps, the Stetson, greasy hair, dirty, three days worth of beard. And Brennan's sitting there and he says, God damn, that's the goddamnedest, realest cowboy I ever seen. And he's all wise that. The other thing about Blood on the Moon is the art direction and the costuming and so forth is very, very realistic. And it gives you this kind of grubby

world of sun dust and of shabby farms and long, wide open spaces and so forth. And it really, I think, visually does the job in much the way when Wise directed the setup, which was his last RKO film, because he saw what Hughes was doing to the studio and he needed to get out. But the setup creates that whole world of the shabby boxing arena and the people yelling for blood and the blind guy watching and the guy with the radio listening to the ball game, that whole milieu of the low class, low undercurrent of the boxing world. I think in Blood on the Moon was kind of a opening gambit for the setup on how the design of the film really captures the theme and involves the audience. And Wise just did a great job on that. And in fact, he left RKO

because of use. He knew that his time there had come to an end and he needed to get out. But Daryl F. Zanuck hired him at Fox on the strength of Blood on the Moon. And of course, he went on to Fox and he made a number of distinguished pictures, including The Day the Earth Stood Still and so forth, and built his reputation. And during the late 50s into the 60s, Wise made some really astute choices, both from an artistic and commercial point of view. I mean, the book ending of directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music, which had been up to that time, the most successful motion picture ever made in terms of box office results and so forth. And Wise won Academy Awards for, I believe, West Side Story.

He became very successful. And this was a guy who started out pumping film cans on a loading dock. And his brother helped him get the job because his older brother worked in the accounting department at RKO. There's no such thing anymore of someone starting out on the loading dock of a studio and working their way up to a director's chair and becoming a producer and a director and an Academy Award winner. But that's what Robert Wise did. And that's part of the story in the book. And of course, he went on to direct Andromeda Strain, Star Trek, the motion picture. I mean, what an amazing career he had.

Absolutely. And I had when I was, this was over 20 years ago, I actually got his number and called him to ask him about Val Luton and the body snatcher and the Val Luton films. Now, here it is. I'm some guy. I have no resume, nothing. I call Robert Wise cold. And he stayed on the phone with me for an hour. I mean, the guy, he was so nice and answered all of my questions. And one of the things is, is he was kind of amused by all the contemporary filmmakers that looked at his films and said, oh, he put this in because of the blacklist and he put this in because of this. And he said, you know, all this stuff is very interesting. And I guess it keeps people interested in the films and everything. And it's good. But he said, the notion that I

was thinking about all this stuff when I was making these movies is absurd because I wasn't, you know, he was very candid about that. You know, Most directors of any era are not necessarily known for being nice guys. Bob Wise was a nice guy. He was a very nice guy. Well, the book comes out March 1. I think it's already available on Kindle for people who want to get a digital. And I'll have links in the podcast show notes and on the website for people who want to purchase it. It is a paperback.

You'll be able to get it from Amazon and other retailers. Alan, what about for those folks who maybe would like to get a signed copy from you? There's, there's a couple of ways to do that. When I get my copies, I'm going to put it on my online store. If you go to www.AllenKRody.com or just Google One Way Shop, because my website's known as One

Way Street, I have One Way Shop where I have a service where I sell my books. And I would be glad to personalize that to anybody who buys the books and they buy it through me through PayPal and I ship them out. I have not received my shipment of books yet. So when I do, I will put that up and then I will publicize that on my social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook. So that way you'll be able to get autographed copies. I also, I'm planning on showing Blood on the Moon at the 23rd annual Arthur Lyons Film Law Festival at the Palm Springs Cultural Center. And that will be May 11th through the 14th. And I am, I'm working right now on programming the films. And I think it's going to be an exciting festival. I have some

exciting guests lined up and films, and I hope to get the lineup of that out as soon as possible. And I don't know whether TCM, the Classic Film Festival, will be showing the movie. I hope they do. But those are places where available. Also, I'm going to be at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 3rd through the 5th, which is at the campus of the University of Arizona with about 100 writers. And I'm going to be doing a number of workshops and a personal appearance with the Real West series that Blood on the Moon is the initial offering. This series is being put out by the University of New Mexico Press, and the initial offerings are Blood on the Moon and also Ride Lonesome by Kirk Ellis,

who was the producer of the John Adams HBO miniseries some years ago, very distinguished producer, screenwriter. And he's written a book on the great Bud Bedeker, Ride Lonesome, the renowned Western starring Randolph Scott. And he and I are going to be on a panel together talking about our books and Westerns and so on and so forth. So I'm really looking forward to being at the Tucson Festival just as Blood on the Moon comes out. Another entry in the Real West series is going to be a book by my colleague Robert Knott on Ride the High Country by Sam Peckinpah. So there's some exciting West for Western fans. There's some exciting books coming out as part of that series. Well, that sounds like a terrific book series and a blood on the moon is,

is going to be kicking that off here. And for those fans who want to get, uh, some of your other books signed as well, you can, um, they'll be able to get those at the same, uh, website that you mentioned. And just so that they know, you also have a book on Charles McGraw that came out earlier, right? Earlier, earlier, as in like 17, 18 years ago, Charles McGraw, Fillmore, tough guy. That was my first book, a very serendipitous experience as I got to know McGraw's family and, and wrote that book. And it is still in print, still available from McFarlane, and also available via my website. I'd be glad to anyone that orders via my website, I will put my John Hancock on Charles McGraw. And that book still sells, believe it or not.

I do talk briefly about Blood on the Moon and Charles McGraw, not obviously to the level of detail. And I have a full picture of him wearing that bearskin coat with the stub of the cigar and the beard. And no one had the aura of a tough guy, in my opinion, a movie tough guy than Charles McGraw, that jaw and the voice and everything. Perfect casting. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, as listeners to this podcast know, they can also get your book on Michael Curtiz. If you want to get a signed copy there as well. And that, I mean, that is, as you mentioned earlier in the discussion, that's a symphony. That's like, that is something that I know I refer to every time That's like, that is something that I know I refer to every time I'm doing a Warner Archive podcast and there's a Curtiz film.

I just pull out your book and I go scan the chapter about that book. It's a wealth of information there. So there's a lot for fans. Well, Alan, it was terrific talking to you today. I know you're struggling with the cold, but thank you so much for coming on. I know you're struggling with the cold, but thank you so much for coming on. And, you know, we should mention that Warner Brothers is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. And I think that of all the studios, I think Warner Brothers has the richest history that looking back at the brothers and what they established that is still going on today,

I think that the history of Warner Brothers is really the history of Hollywood. And I think thematically, that's going to be one of the themes at the TCM Classic Film Festival. And I believe that there's a documentary in the works about that. So I'm really excited that Warner Brothers is still with us. And I think that, again, Warner Brothers has such a rich history. And when you go on the lot and you see the sound stages and you see this is where Casablanca was filmed, this is where Captain Blood was filmed. And I wrote about all this in the Curtiz book. I think Warner Brothers, the lot, and the studio

are really an example of a continuum of Hollywood history. And I think it's worth celebrating Jack, Harry, and the rest of the brothers, the 100th anniversary of their studio. And I think we should all keep that in mind. Those of us who love classic Hollywood and love the

movie should keep that in mind. Well, Alan, as always, it's a pleasure to get you on the podcast and you're just a wealth of information and terrific stories. So thank you. Thank you, Tim. It's always good to be here. And thanks for having me on. I appreciate it very much. You bet. Since this film, Blood on the Moon, was released by the Warner Archive in 2020, I did ask George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive

if he could give us a little background on what went into the restoration and remastering of this Blu-ray. So here's George. Well, this was a film that was not available on DVD. It was one of those films that we did not have decent materials to work from where we could put it out on DVD. And we basically went on a scavenger hunt to find the best material. And we finally did.

And I believe if my memory is serving me correct, we got this finished right before COVID lockdown. And I think we released it at the very beginning of COVID lockdown. But we worked on it, I believe, toward the end of 2019. And it had been over a year in the making. And we had to piece together various elements and were able to make it look and sound magnificent. And I had seen, like I had the laser disc. It just looked awful. It looked awful on TV.

And we were able to make it look gorgeous. And we were working from nitrate materials. And we restored the audio. It was such a treasure. Because it's a very special, unique film. And I'm just delighted that it continues to be among our top sellers of Blu-rays. People really love this movie. sellers of Blu-rays. People really love this movie. And Robert Mitchum is kind of a guarantee when you've got him in a movie, people are going to want to buy the Blu-ray.

He's just one of my favorite actors. And I'm not alone in that thought, obviously. But you also get Robert Preston before the music man being a bad guy. But the restoration was a truly labor of love at Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging. And I can't believe it's almost three years since we released it. But that's the beauty of these discs. If you do them right, they continue to sell and they continue to live on because they're definitive presentations of the movie.

For those of you interested in purchasing the book, Blood on the Moon, there are links in the podcast show notes and on our website at www.theextras.tv. at www.theextras.tv. And that'll be for both the autographed copies from Alan and his website, or if you want to just order the paperback from Amazon. And I'll have links for the Warner Archive Blu-ray of the film there as well. It's a terrific companion to get both if you'd like to do that.

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