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, which was 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 ...