Yellow Sky

Stay away from my men, and stop swinging those damn hips all over the place.

Stretch is the leader of bank robbing desperadoes, after their latest job they find the US Cavalry hot on their tail. Their only conceivable route of escape is to traipse over an enormous salt flat, low on water and bitten by the scorching sun, they happen to come across a ghost town named Yellow Sky. Here was once a prosperous town, now the only inhabitants are a crusty old prospector and his tomboy granddaughter. Soon the talk turns to hidden gold and it's not long before these desperate men will become conflicted in more ways than one. Be it greed, lust or the Apache, the day of reckoning is coming to Yellow Sky.

Yellow Sky is a technically stunning picture, directed with panache by William A. Welman, boasting starkly affecting black and white photography from Joseph MacDonald, and utilising the wonderful use of natural sounds. This picture is to me one of the shining lights of 1940s Westerns. Once the pulse racing pursuit of the robbers by the US Cavalry has finished, the film shifts into a master class of visual and dialogue driven delights. As the gang trundle across the desolate salt flat, the need for quenching the thirst hits the audience as much as it does the gang; I myself found that I was swigging rapidly from my cold can of beer! The Alabama Hills location is a sprawling, beautiful, never ending ode to the West, and then the actors kick in and do their stuff, and then some.

Gregory Peck plays the leader Stretch, an actor normally associated with a straight laced gait, here he is is weather worn and tired, his portrayal of Stretch as convincing as a role I have seen him tackle. Richard Widmark, in what I believe to be his first Western entry, is truly magnetic, a smirking, snarling Dude that you just know you couldn't trust if your life depended on it. Anne Baxter plays the sole female character of the piece (Mike), and she is pivotal to the whole film's strength, tough and full of spunk, her grasping of the situation in amongst these ragged men gives the piece it's time bomb ethic, and boy does Baxter do well with it.

All told there's no weakness' in the casting, they all do good work, and although the plot structure of the film is nothing out of the ordinary, the technical aspects coupled with the excellent writing on the page (W.R. Burnett story, Lamar Trotti screenplay) lift it way above many of its contemporaries. The ending has caused some consternation amongst Western critics over the years, and if I'm honest then it's not totally satisfactory to me personally, but it is in no way what so ever a bad ending, you just feel that the mood that had preceded it deserved something better. But as ever, it's up to the individual viewer to decide for themselves. 9/10

Lost men in the Old West willing to kill over lucre and lust

In 1867, a band of bank robbers (Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Harry Morgan, etc.) flee through the salt flats of the desert Southwest and stumble into a ghost town inhabited only by an old prospector and his comely tomboy granddaughter (James Barton & Anne Baxter). Life-or-death conflicts ensue.

“Yellow Sky” (1948) is a top-of-the-line classic B&W Western that borrows the basic premise of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and influenced future Westerns, like “The Law and Jake Wade” (1958) and “Day of the Outlaw” (1959), not to mention the sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet” (1956). There’s even a remake set during the gold rush of South Africa with Vincent Price called “The Jackals” (1967).

If you remove the opening and closing score, which is understandably passé, this holds up in the modern day as a psychological adult Western that’s film noir-ish. While some people favor B&W, I don’t (although I can roll with it), and would love to see a colorized version.

Anne Baxter was only 24 during filming.

The film runs 1 hour, 38 minutes, and was shot at Owens Lake, Death Valley National Monument, and Alabama Hills, just west of Lone Pine, California.

GRADE: A-

Gregory Peck ("Stretch") leads a miscreant gang of bank robbers, who are chased by a troop of army cavalry into a deserted gold mining town that's occupied only by a young (and pretty) Anne Baxter ("Mike") and her grandfather James Barton. Desperately thirsty after their trudge across the salt flats, the men are soon suitably revivified - body and soul - and set their sights on this young lady, and on their gold. After quite a few, entertaining, scraps "Stretch" and the feisty woman gradually start to bond, and they make a deal to split their golden horde - worth some $50,000 - 50/50 . The only thing is, they have to dig it out of their collapsed mine. "Dude" (Richard Widmark) is less convinced by this plan, and as their digging continues, and a tribe of Apache - frustrated with the limitations of their reservation lives - arrive, what trust there was between the gang members becomes seriously compromised. William Wellman and photographer Joe MacDonald have worked wonders with the arid, inhospitable (Death Valley) scenario for this film. The characters allow their surroundings to compliment their predicaments well; the dialogue is sparing with plenty of action to keep the pace up. The ending is a bit rushed, and there is something of the "Calamity Jane" about Baxter's performance (without any singing) that I struggled with - but it's got an atmosphere to it that renders it well worth watching.