Yellow Sky

William A. Wellman enjoyed a long and varied career, helming such perennials as Wings (1927), A Star is Born (1937) and Beau Geste (1939). He hit his stride in the '40s with stark, unsentimental genre flicks like The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Battleground (1949). Yellow Sky (1948) fits snugly within that rubric, a simple but striking Western.

After a botched bank robbery, James Dawson (Gregory Peck) leads his outlaw band across Death Valley. They arrive at Yellow Sky, an abandoned mining town occupied only by a prospector (James Barton) and his tomboy daughter Mike (Ann Baxter). Dawson discovers the two sit atop a gold mine, which his gang's eager to plunder. But Dawson has other ideas. He'd really rather go straight, and starts developing an attachment to Mike. His lieutenants Dude (Richard Widmark) and Lengthy (John Russell) don't like that idea, initiating conflict.

Yellow Sky wraps a lot of story in its 98 minute runtime. There's a gritty sparseness reminiscent of Budd Boetticher all the characters and situations are stock, yet so expertly presented it's hard to complain. Dawsno starts as a rough character, roughing up his men and threatening to rape Mike, but a few heart-to-hearts and a shave later, he's your typical Western hero. Writer Lamar Trotti gives villain simple motives to drive their treachery: Dude just wants to justify the gang's hardship; Lengthy falls for Mike. It's  frontier myth splashed with a dose of harsh reality.

But Wellman's direction really stands out. Yellow Sky's opening is a self-contained gem, with Dawson's gang trekking across Death Valley. It's a remarkable sequence, presaging Wellman's later Westward the Woman: frontier life is no grand adventure but a wearying hardship. He makes ingenious use of the ghost town setting and handles mandated set pieces well, occasionally even subverting them (a band of menacing Apaches come and go without incident). Joseph MacDonald's photography adds a noir-ish feel, mixing stark shadows with neat optical effects (including a proto-Bond "gun barrel" scene). Along with the near-absence of music, it's a unique experience.

Gregory Peck successfully transitions from rapacious lout (shades of his Duel in the Sun character) to straight-edged hero. This convenient reform works because, well, he's Gregory Peck. Richard Widmark adds another pre-stardom dastard to his resume. Anne Baxter makes a convincing tough gal who never goes completely soft. James Barton can't help coming off as a Walter Huston manque - though this film came out the same year as Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Yellow Sky is a solid Western. The story breaks little new ground, but its efficient structure and foreboding photography make it worth a watch.