Fifty Years of Film in 50 Weeks, #28: Yellow Sky, 1948

Yellow Sky, 1948

Director: William A. Wellman
Writers: Screenplay by Lamar Trotti from a story by W.R. Burnett.
Cinematographer: Joe MacDonald
Producer: Lamar Trotti for 20th Century Fox
Starring: Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, Richard Widmark; Robert Arthur, John Russell, Harry Morgan, James Barton, Charles Kemper.

Why I chose it
Three reasons: 1) It's a Western (a neglected genre in my blog series so far); 2) a Western directed by the great William Wellman; and 3) a Western directed by William Wellman starring Gregory Peck. Peck is an actor whose filmography has remained largely unseen by me...and I'm not sure why. But he's a giant of the classic era and I need to see more of him.

Where and when Yellow Sky is set

'No-spoiler' plot overview 'Stretch' Dawson (Gregory Peck) leads a gang of Western bank robbers in the post-Civil War Southwest. After a robbery they escape the pursuing cavalry only to run into a stretch of desert that nearly desiccates them. But then they come upon a ghost mining town inhabited by "Mike" (Anne Baxter), a young woman who has a fondness for brandishing a gun, and her grandfather. It turns out that there is gold in them thar hills, and Stretch manages to gain the trust of the local pair and arranges a deal to get a share of the gold if he can find it. Meanwhile, rifts develop among the men as greed gains its hold. 'Dude' (Richard Widmark) hatches a plot to claim all the gold, and a series of confrontations ensue.

Stretch (Peck) taking charge of a Wild West bank robbery.
William Gould is uncredited as the bank teller here.

Walking across Death Valley with no water is pretty rough
on one's features, as seen here in Robert Arthur's character "Bull Run"

Production Background
Director William Wellman was known for his rugged individualism both in front and behind the camera. Affectionately known as "Wild Bill", this WWI veteran didn't hesitate to execute dangerous stunts for himself and his cast and crew in the interests of splashing tales of masculinity-tested on screen. He was known for Wings, a silent classic about WWI fliers, and boundary-pushing pre-codes such as Safe in Hell, The Public Enemy, and Night Nurse, just to name a few. He also directed comedies (Nothing Sacred) and dramas (A Star is Born) before getting into Westerns with The Ox-Bow Incident, which I reviewed here. A couple of years ago on this blog, I had intended to publish a series of posts discussing Wellman's films, but sadly only managed one so far: it's here. 

William Wellman as a young man

Yellow Sky was the only time Wellman worked with Gregory Peck. Peck was not completely new to the Western genre; he had already starred in the Western Duel in the Sun, in which he played an unsavory type. He went on to make several more in the late 1940s and for much of the remainder of his career, off and on. His dark, lean, and rugged good looks served him well here.

Stretch (Peck) looking a bit peaked. "You smell!, Mike tells him.

Here Stretch is shaved and cleaned up.

 
While the cinematography by Joe MacDonald may not reach the iconographic height of a John Ford film (MacDonald had been employed by Ford to shoot My Darling Clementine in 1946), the locations were well used here: the scene in the desert was filmed in the Death Valley salt flats and other scenes in the Lone Pine rock formations of California, adding a grounded realism to a plot that largely develops on an intellectual rather than narrative level. And MacDonald made terrific use of black-and-white.

Preparing to ride into the desert.

The rugged beauty of the Wild West, captured by Joe MacDonald's camera.

Some other notable film-related events in 1948 (from Filmsite.org):

• The Supreme Court ruled that the "Big Five" movie studios had to end their monopolization of the industry. They were forced to divest themselves from theater chains by selling them off. Block booking, the system by which an exhibitor was forced to buy a whole line of films from a studio, was also deemed illegal by a court decision that legislated the separation of the production and exhibition functions of the film industry. This marked the beginning of the end of the studio system, and was partially responsible for a major slump in the movie business by all the studios in the late 1940s.
  
• Maverick film producer, aviator, and eccentric wealthy industrialist Howard Hughes purchased RKO Studios for a reported $8.8 million. Hughes led RKO during a long period of decline until the mid-1950s.
  
• In the horror-comedy spoof Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi (as Count Dracula) and Lon Chaney, Jr. (as The Wolf Man) portrayed their iconic horror characters for the last time on-screen in a feature film. It was Lugosi's second and final time as Count Dracula, following the original 1931 film.
  
• Director Alfred Hitchcock's first Technicolored feature film was the experimental thriller Rope (1948), the first of four films with James Stewart. The film was notable for its seamless intercutting of long 10-minute takes, creating the appearance of the film's action occurring all in real-time.

My Random Observations

• This was an entertaining movie all around. That's why it struck me as incredibly odd that for most of the running time there was no musical underscore. Composer Alfred Newman got the credit for the music, but I kept thinking that this must have been an easy assignment for him. There was some music at the beginning and then near the end, but its significant absence was disconcerting to me. As it was a deliberate choice, perhaps the silence was meant to symbolize the lack of life in the desert and then the ghost town? 
• Gregory Peck is a compelling Western hero. He not only convinced as a rough opportunist, but his subtle transformation and internal struggle as he found his moral center was well portrayed. 
• In the early part of the film I was feeling echoes of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), in which the gang implodes over greed; it became clear after a bit that this narrative was going in a different direction and Peck was going to emerge victorious through the violence that his compatriots initiate.

Real Western men take off their shirts when working, as demonstrated
by 'Lengthy' (John Russell) and Stretch (Peck).

The gang's negotiations with bedridden Grandpa are a bit tense.

• I'm becoming a fan of Anne Baxter. Before my classic film obsession began, I only knew her as the exotic, emotional Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments. In this one her role as "Mike" couldn't have been more different. Extremely young and projecting innocence despite her exterior thick skin, you'd be hard pressed to recognize her as the same actress. (Of course, she had powerhouse performances as Eve in All About Eve and had just come off her Oscar-winning performance in The Razor's Edge). As a bonus, she had great chemistry with Gregory Peck.

Spunky "Mike," as played by a very young and sweet-looking Anne
Baxter, doesn't take prisoners.

Yep, there is a romance developing here.

• Richard Widmark was also very good, although he didn't impress me much as I felt his performance was a close cousin to the various somewhat unhinged villains he'd made his specialty to that point; his wild grins and laughter grated a bit for that reason. (See my post about his villain Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death here; this one was made just a year before Yellow Sky).

Widmark as "Dude" flashes his impish, insidious smile.

• While I had an idea of where this would lead in the end, the script of the last couple of scenes surprised me. And to keep the spoilers at bay, I won't say any more! 

Where to Watch
A DVD is available from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. It can be streamed with a subscription to one of a few streaming services: check here.

Further Reading
Fellow blogger Caftan Woman wrote a terrific review of the film here.

Western Movie Summer Part 2: THE OX-BOW INCIDENT & WHEN THE DALTONS RODE

This installment of #WesternMovieSummer finds me in the early 1940s for two contrasting films, one considered a classic and the other not so much.  The two pictures are filmed in black and white and that's about where the similarities end.  I've already had a moment or two this past week of feeling overwhelmed as the vastness of this genre has been driven home to me -- apparently 30% of movies made in the Hollywood studio era were westerns -- but, undeterred, I'm soldiering on, watching and enjoying a fascinating sampling of the genre.

THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943)

This is the "classic" of the two, directed by William Wellman, and starring Henry Fonda, by then a major star of 20th Century Fox, and with Dana Andrews in a small but critical role.  It's entirely fiction, based on the 1940 novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, of the same name, and packs a depressing and spare story into 81 minutes.  It twists our guts as an entirely unromanticized tale of brutality, making the viewing experience more educational than entertaining.  Fonda is nothing like his noble 'YOUNG MR. LINCOLN' character or even his Frank James in JESSE JAMES.  For those who like their Westerns tackling head-on the ugly reality of much of society who pushed forward into lawless unsettled territories, this one won't disappoint. As discussed by Prof. Slotkin in his Western Movie course, the film's key subject, lynching of a small band of settlers accused of cattle rustling and murder, would have been understood by contemporary audiences as a parable for the rampant practice of lynching of African Americans, still prevalent at the time.

Anthony Quinn, Dana Andrews, and Francis Ford as the victims, Frank Conroy at right as Major Tetley

Further driving this point home, the most heroic character of the film, the one most willing to stand up in opposition to the lynching, is an African American character, Sparks.  Ironically, and sadly, the actor Leigh Whipper, went uncredited in the film.  His career was quite long and eventful, and he is cited as having been the first African-American actor to join the Actor's Equity Association.

Leigh Whipper as "Sparks." Image from diva-harrington.com

Despite the bleak tone, the story and characters are well drawn, the direction is tense, and the message is timeless.  I especially appreciated Andrews here, as a desperate man caught in the web of hate.  Secondary character Harry Davenport is excellent, as is young Harry Morgan and Anthony Quinn, who's oily but attractive. The film does not waste time setting the atmosphere --  in the very first scene, as Fonda and friend Morgan ride into town, the view of the town shows very little life:

Also early on, we understand the nature of Fonda's character as a man who, while not necessarily criminal, is not someone we'd admire. Within the first few minutes Fonda downs several whiskeys, gets into a fistfight as a result of a minor insult, gets knocked out cold, and when coming to has to rush out of the bar to throw up.  The close-ups and medium shots do not flatter him.  Because he's Henry Fonda we expect him to act the hero, but he lets us down a few times during the film.  He does emerge at the end, however, as a somewhat changed man.

Henry Fonda not looking his best.

Those familiar with the novel or the film will surely point to the many societal lessons and psychological depths embedded in it. For me, it was a potent reminder that even in the relatively early years of Hollywood, Westerns were not all romanticized visions or rousing action melodramas, and that the studio system could buck the expected societal values and critique them.

WHEN THE DALTONS RODE (1940)
In sharp contrast is this minor but entertaining western, made in 1940 for Universal Studios.  At the helm was George Marshall, a talented director who scored brilliantly with DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939) and is also known for the Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake noir THE BLUE DAHLIA.  The film chronicles the heyday of the real-life 'Dalton gang' of brothers, who, in the James & Younger gang mode, terrorized stagecoaches, trains and banks in the early 1890s in and around Kansas until they met their end, not unlike many other outlaws of the era, in a grand shoot-out.  The film, of course, greatly fictionalizes the story, and in the tradition of the JESSE JAMES movie, tries hard to keep our sympathies on the side of this gang of murderers by giving them a sympathetic, loving matriarch, a law-abiding hero/friend in protagonist Randolph Scott, and a justification for their turning outlaw in the greedy, unscrupulous land-grubbing capitalists who make life tough for them.

I found a sharp contrast between the subject matter and the tone of the film, set up from the beginning in the onscreen narration which does not mince words about the lawless and brutal nature of the Daltons, but is accompanied by the most upbeat and jaunty music imaginable. Introduced early on the brothers, portrayed by Broderick Crawford, Brian Donlevy, Frank Albertson & Stuart Erwin, are shown to be a rowdy bunch of good-hearted pranksters who are out to have a good time and celebrate their Ma's birthday.  Crawford as 'Bob' Dalton, is even the local sheriff and is engaged to the lovely telegraph operator Kay Francis.  Even when it's made clear that the gang has succumbed to the life of crime, and the body count rises, the film seems to want to make it clear that they are just a short redemptive act away from returning to the right side of the law.  The men of the town are shown to be largely a group of buffoons, in which the Daltons are clearly part.  Andy Devine plays his usual dupe for comic effect on many occasions.  The only smart characters are Scott's Tod Jackson, Francis, and George Bancroft as the businessman/villain.  And very unlike THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, this town is filled with folk:

The last fifteen minutes of the film, though, are somewhat grim, as the brothers find themselves ambushed, and there is a prolonged shoot-out in which there is little music, only shots fired repeatedly in an intense sequence, until every last gang member is dead (this would not be a spoiler considering the real-life end for this gang, captured in some morbid photos that can be found online).  Ironically the youngest of the brothers, Emmett Dalton, is shown as being killed, but in real life he lived to write an autobiography on which the film is supposedly based.

The brothers being photographed with their Ma (played by Mary Gordon) . 

While there are no social critiques of note here, and the film exists primarily to entertain those looking for a pseudo-historical romp, it is a fun watch, with daring stunts and colorful characters.  The cast seems to be having a grand time.  Kay Francis, on the way down from her career high as elegant pre-code 'woman of the world' roles, is still stunning and compelling as the love interest.  As a film capitalizing on the success of JESSE JAMES and the depression-era audiences who would expect to root for the common man against evil capitalists, it's an example of studio-era Hollywood fare very much of its time.

Kay Francis and Randolph Scott "meet cute" at the cow pen