Watching Yellow Sky (1948) was an odd experience. For the first time I could remember, when I reached the end of a movie I couldn’t decide whether I actually liked it or not. I recorded some extensive musings in my journal at the time (March 2016) on why that was—most of this post is drawn from those journal entries where I put down thoughts as they came, so any sense of meandering or following tangents here is likely owing to that.
The Plot
After a successful bank robbery, an outlaw gang led by Stretch (Gregory Peck) shakes off a posse’s pursuit via a long, harrowing journey across a barren desert. Nearly dead of thirst, they find refuge and water on the other side in the abandoned mining town of Yellow Sky, whose sole inhabitants are a lone old man (James Barton) and his tough, tomboyish granddaughter (Anne Baxter). Before long the outlaws tumble to the fact that the pair must have a reason for living out here, and that the reason must be a hidden stash of gold. They promptly decide they’ll have a share of that too, and set out to force the old man and the girl into revealing its hiding-place.
During this time various conflicts come into play among the gang members. Cold, calculating gambler Dude (Richard Widmark) watches his chance to make a power play, especially since he has no intention of letting Stretch indulge an inclination to see that the old man and his granddaughter are left with a fair share of the gold; brutish Lengthy (John Russell) has his eye on the girl. The remaining outlaws’ allegiance wavers back and forth depending on who seems to have the upper hand at the moment. Eventually, after Stretch openly declares his intention to see a fair division of the gold, matters come to a showdown amongst them.
Again, ’ware spoilers, including for some
other movies I’ll be dragging into it.
Like 3:10 to Yuma, in an artistic sense Yellow Sky is excellent. The stunning black-and-white cinematography and the crisp direction by William Wellman (whose movies always manage to impress me in some way) are a pleasure, and the cast’s performances are all good. But as far as story goes, I had a very hard time liking any of the characters, even the leads played by Peck and Baxter whom we’re supposed to find sympathetic. The old love-hate romance angle requires thorough suspension of disbelief, and they sometimes make decisions that seem just plain idiotic (for Pete’s sake, girl, just send Grandpa to the spring for water and stay away from the outlaws!).
Of course, it was a foregone conclusion that Peck’s outlaw Stretch would reform by the end. But with the rest of the supporting cast, a curious sense of irresolution pervades the whole film. I kept waiting for a decisive moment when someone would finally show a streak of honest humanity, or when the pressure of circumstances would finally make everyone show their true colors one way or the other. But it didn’t really happen—the indeterminate lesser gang members remain in limbo, showing only weak flashes of either craven selfishness or a very slight leaning toward decency, but not enough to either wholly condemn or redeem them.
A number of critics have complained about the ending of Yellow Sky, mainly because of its tone being too cheerful or because of its portraying our tomboy heroine embracing femininity. I had a completely different criticism: the casual leniency with which the surviving minor outlaws are treated. Sure, they haven’t actually committed any egregious crime, since their attempted mutiny failed; but that’s not through any merit of their own. It’s mainly because their shots missed. And there are really no redeeming qualities about the characters themselves. They are infinitely less appealing than, say, the characters of Howard and Curtin in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who in a slightly similar way are saved from participating in a murder by a deus ex machina. Curtin has already passed the test of one temptation to do evil earlier in the film, and even though he fails the second, I’ve always felt that his demeanor during the letter-reading scene afterwards shows him as ashamed of what they were about to do, and that if he’d read the letter first he wouldn’t have voted in favor of the murder.
The outlaws of Yellow Sky, on the other hand, seem to wind up innocent of greater crimes merely because they didn’t have the guts to pull them off successfully. I think the ending should at the very least have shown them taking a different trail than the others, because I don’t see them all happily going straight together after the kind of betrayal they’d attempted. An outlaw boss might accept failed mutineers slinking back to his side like whipped dogs, but not a man bent on forging an honest career from henceforward. I don’t see him trusting them.
Film Noir
I’d unhesitatingly class Yellow Sky as Western film noir. Which begs the question, what is film noir? I know little of the genre personally but a good deal at second-hand, and the nutshell view I’ve formed of it is: striking and even beautiful in visuals, but dark, cynical and frequently hopeless in story and theme. Perhaps the real question is—is noir an attempt to visually beautify what’s essentially ugly?
I like a bit of noir’s surface aesthetic as well as anyone on occasion—its striking use of light and shadow, a bit of its hard-boiled streetlights-and-fedoras atmosphere, a dash of its suspense and angst; but I suspect I’m essentially out of tune with its underlying pessimism. Hence my ambivalence toward Yellow Sky where the characters are basically depraved and at best anti-heroic. I can digest a dash of dark atmosphere on occasion if there’s at least one character of strong integrity who emerges from the darkness intact, but you don’t get that often with anti-heroes.
Perhaps the out-of-tune-ness is because noir and its anti-heroes are forever going up and down the dark streets with unanswered questions, whereas my Christian worldview is by nature an answer rather than a question. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, “Christians have ceased to be seekers and enquirers; they are men and women who have ceased to doubt.” In that case, storytelling that fails to answer the questions it poses (or to give sound reasons for its characters’ choice of good or evil) will always come across as unsatisfying.
I think a good example of a noir (or noir-ish) film with a more positive resolution is The Third Man—where the protagonist, despite his flaws and weaknesses, comes out of the story better than he was because he grimly hung on and did what he was persuaded was the right thing. Though it’s not a traditional happy ending in the sense that the protagonist doesn’t get everything he wanted, one gets a sense that he has learned from his experiences and is a wiser and perhaps a stronger man than he was before. Yellow Sky, on the other hand, has a bit of the same problem I noted with both Four Faces West and 3:10 to Yuma: a character predictably “reforming” merely through a vague inner instinct toward decency—not because he’s been forced to confront and acknowledge his own wrongdoing before making a conscious choice to change.
In one respect the script of Yellow Sky could be called a success, because it did defy some of my expectations of cliché; aside from the predictable arc of Peck’s character, it really kept me guessing what would happen next. But if you could combine that quality of suspense and unexpectedness with a stronger sense of integrity and resolution like I’ve been talking about, then you would have a real crackerjack of a story.
Westerns and Noir
Can a Western be a film noir? Sure it can. You can tell any story in a noir style if you want to. But for the purposes of this blog series, the question is: does the noir approach that crept into many late-40s and ’50s Western movies have any relation at all to the real American West?
When I think back over the history and pre-1930s Western fiction that I’ve read, I’m hard-pressed to find something with a mood similar to Yellow Sky. Danger, hardship, drama, certainly. Victorian-style melodrama, oh yes. But very little of the morbid, anti-heroic cynicism, despair and angst that you find in noir fiction or film. You’re much more likely to find a mood of irreverent, cheeky humor and determined optimism in the face of danger and hardship. Historian and author W.H. Hutchinson, considering the question of why a writer such as Eugene Rhodes has been overlooked by serious critics, made the keen observation that “the frontier forgot to be joyless”—as plenty of other earlier writers besides Rhodes, also largely forgotten by the mainstream, have demonstrated in their recollections and stories.
Is the style in which one chooses to tell a story irrelevant? I don’t think so. Much as I may find the noir style entertaining, I think its invasion of the Western film genre was just one more element that helped to blur and distort the picture of a previous century in the eyes of modern filmgoers.
Next time: Conclusion to the series.
Hamlette says
I’ve got a blog post on “why do I, a Christian, feel so drawn to film noir?” that I’ve been working on for like five years now. Maybe more. I keep adding to it, but never feel like I’ve said everything I want to say.
Basically, though, one of the reasons I love so many noir films, and the style as a whole, is because it’s refreshingly honest about the inherent sinfulness of mankind. It doesn’t try to gloss over our fallen natures with “everyone has some good in him somewhere” humanistic nonsense. It shows people struggling with temptation —
sometimes overcoming it, often succumbing to it, but not just discovering their “inner goodness” or something else falsely hopeful like that. And it is very, very good at showing that actions have consequences. Maybe unpleasant or tragic ones, but consequences nonetheless.
So I like western noir because it tends to be meaty, weighty. It has different problems than just “I came here to find the man who shot my pa” or “this is the bad guy, this is the good guy.” It gets into deeper questions about rightness and wrongness, and that fascinates me. Not that I don’t like the simpler western stories too, because I do. I enjoy both.
But again, I don’t expect movies to reflect the reality of the time they’re set in. I look to them to tell interesting stories with compelling characters, not be history lessons.
Elisabeth Grace Foley says
Do you expect/prefer historical accuracy more when you’re reading historical fiction? I find it interesting that people tend to be more lenient with movies when it comes to inaccuracies they would likely criticize if they found them in a book.
Oh yes, I think what you say about noir here is quite true. I just feel that if a story is going to delve into those dark places, it ought also to be able to balance things out by at least pointing the reader/viewer toward an alternative of truth and light. For a Christian who understands the truth about the fallen nature of man, a noir-type story can serve as a reminder or a cautionary tale; but then, Christians aren’t necessarily the largest audience or even the intended audience of most mainstream art—so what can it do for an unbeliever except reinforce their ideas of life as bleak and meaningless?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not arguing for simplistic stories in Westerns! Deep questions about right and wrong are great; I just think they need to have answers that make sense (moral sense as well as logical).
Annie says
I held off on reading this post until I had a chance to watch the film earlier this week.
I really appreciated this post (and the comment discussion thus far from both you and Hamlette!). I agree 100% with the historical inaccuracies of this sort of mood. It certainly is not normal in the old western books (both fiction and non-fiction) where the folks face the worst of hard lives with a jovialness that is something to behold. And that hope-filled cheerful “take it on the chin and keep grinning” attitude is one of the things that draws me so to the westerns of the early 1900’s and makes me love them so!
In thinking it over a little, I can only recall one old western book right now that had a similar noir approach and feel to “Yellow Sky”, and that was the very controversial “The Banditti of the Plains” by Ava Mercer.
Oh, there’s so much that one could discuss from this post and film! Much more than I could squeeze into a comment. This series has been some of my favorite reading on your blog yet! Very
Annie says
Whoops! It looks like there must have been a glitch in my computer when I submitted that comment and all of it didn’t go thorough. Asa Mercer’s book was strikingly moody and hopeless. Even taking into consideration the subject matter (Have you ever studied the Johnson County War and it’s effect on fiction’s “bad cattleman vs. honest settler” stereotype?)
I was saying in that last sentence that these “The Way of the Western” posts have been very thought provoking and fun to read aloud.