YELLOW SKY

It seems as though great Gregory Peck Westerns are like buses - you wait ages for one, then two come along at once.  After recently watching a neglected classic, 'The Gunfighter', I was pleasantly surprised at how good this 1948 obscurity, directed by William Wellman, is.

Peck plays Stretch, the leader of a gang of bank robbers soon after the end of the Civil War.  To escape the US Army after a robbery they are forced to cross some salt flats in Death Valley.  Barely surviving this ordeal the film proper starts when they reach a ghost town, Yellow Sky, once the base for gold prospecting. 

The only inhabitants are a young girl, Mike (played by Anne Baxter) and her grandfather, who have hung around after everyone else has left.  It transpires that they've got oodles of gold stashed away in one of the mine shafts, which has collapsed.

A deal is reached between Stretch and Grandpa to split the gold 50/50.  There's plenty to go around so that everyone should be happy.  But of course they're not. 

In particular one of the gang, Dude (Richard Widmark) is the bitter and twisted type who doesn't like sharing.  And then there's another gang member, Lengthy, who lusts after Mike. Needless to say a romance develops between Stretch and Mike, once she has gotten over her initial hostility to the gang.

So inevitably we get to a falling out between Stretch and the rest of the gang, led by Dude, leading to a final shootout, followed by a happy ending, including Stretch and what's left of the gang (Walrus and Half Pint) returning the money they stole at the start of the film.

This plot summary doesn’t do the film justice. 

The screenplay, by Lamar Trotti, is topnotch, keeping the plot moving whilst allowing enough character development to get me invested. Trotti was an unfamiliar name to me but he had won an Oscar a few years earlier, and many years after his death received a lifetime achievement award, so this film was clearly not a one off.

Wellman of course was an accomplished director, and here he makes very good use of some wonderfully stark black-and-white cinematography by Joseph MacDonald.

This film can be seen as a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'.  The best such adaptation is undoubtedly 'Forbidden Planet' but this picture is definitely worth a watch.