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.

Westward the Women

Westward the Women (1951) is an overlooked gem. William Wellman applies the same unsentimental grittiness to the Old West as he did to war films like Battleground, resulting in a stark, memorably unique oater.

Roy Whitman (John McIntire) runs a small, thriving boom town in California, but it's missing something: women. Whitman travels east, commissioning hard-bitten trail boss Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) to help him gather single females and transport them West. Plenty of women volunteer for the journey, but it proves extremely arduous. The cowhands can't keep their hands off the girls, the elements are harsh and hostile Indians are waiting around the bend. When Buck's men abandon the team, Wyatt, Whitman, Japanese sidekick Ito (Henry Nakamura) are forced to rely on their charges to complete the trip.

Westward the Women is a harsh film. It seems a subversion of John Ford's classics Stagecoach and Wagon Master, where Western settlement is a glorious, redemptive adventure. Here, Buck bluntly lays things on the line: at least a third of the women coming along will perish. It's a brutal attritional struggle, the women forced to survive accidents, stampedes, Indian attacks, rattlesnakes and inter-party strife. It's such a brutal experience that the few bits of sentimentality (the Italian family and their dog) don't really register.

Females fare poorly in the Western genre, usually relegated to token love interests, whores or weirdos with Freudian baggage (The Furies anyone?). Westward the Women's protagonists are refreshingly down-to-earth, lacking Hollywood glamor or twisted psychology. A few attachments form but Wyatt sternly forbids romance, realizing it will derail the train's chances. The women adapt readily to trail life, learning to ride, shoot and corral animals, though their eagerness doesn't always match their skill. This portrait of tough, self-sufficient frontierswomen is Westward's most interesting feature.

Wellman's previous looks at the Old West were similarly bleak: The Ox-Bow Incident, Yellow Sky. There isn't a dull moment here, each incident the building an atmosphere of dispair and tension. William C. Mellor's stark Utah photography manages to be beautiful and forbidding. The big selling point is the wonderfully gritty look and feel: the protagonists seem like pioneers, not movie-stars playing dress-up. Wellman's understatement continues even through the very Fordian finale, which plays as anti-climax rather than glorious celebration.

Robert Taylor (Devil's Doorway) is an unremitting hardass who thinks nothing of summarily executing a rapacious cowhand, and refuses to soften even after falling for one of his charges. John McIntire (The Far Country) is good playing an unusually sympathetic character. Henry Nakamura's Japanese (!) cowboy hedges around stereotype: largely used for comic relief, he later proves himself as Buck's dependable right-hand man.

The female ensemble cast, however, steals the show. Denise Darcel's (Vera Cruz) fallen woman goes through a lot, including an attempted rape, but remains endearing and tough to the end. Julie Bishop (Sands of Iwo Jima) and Lenore Lonergan also make impressions, though Renata Vanni's Italian widow is a bit irritating. The most interesting character, though, is Hope Emerson's Patience, a salty matron with a nautical vocabulary.

Westward the Women is an underrated Western. It's hard film to find, but definitely worth seeking out.

Beau Geste

Beau Geste is another classic adventure from Hollywood's golden year, 1939. Based on a P.C. Wren novel, it's the most iconic - and shamelessly romantic - film portrayal of the French Foreign Legion. It's not as brilliant as its same-year counterparts The Four Feathers or Gunga Din but it's enjoyable enough as featherweight escapism.

Three orphaned children - Beau Geste (Gary Cooper) and brothers Digby (Robert Preston) and John (Ray Milland) - live with foster mother Lady Brandon (Heather Thatcher), a generous British noblewoman spurned by her husband. Lady Brandon plans to sell a family jewel for money, but someone steals it and blame falls on the Gestes. The brothers flee to the French Foreign Legion, and are shipped to Algeria where they serve under the sadistic Sergeant Markoff (Brian Donlevy). The Gestes make plenty of friends, but run afoul of Markoff and his weaselly informant Rassinoff (J. Carroll Naish), who knows their secret. An attempted mutiny and attacks by marauding Tuaregs postpones the confrontation, but a reckoning with Markoff is inevitable.

Beau Geste is pitched at an adolescent level, playing like a precocious thirteen year old's fantasy. It portrays the Foreign Legion as a summer camp, with lots of cool guys and fun activities but a jackass counselor who tries to ruin everything. This fantasy is undeniably appealing; who wouldn't want to go off with your brothers and friends to an exotic country and fight Arabs? (Granted, that last part isn't so exciting these days.) The undying camraderie of the brothers drives the story forward, kids who never grow up and always stick together, and the movie earns its sentimentality by playing things absolutely straight.

Beau Geste is enjoyable but dramatically mixed, getting by on the barest minimum of plot. The story is extremely thin, and the rivalry between the Geste and Markoff isn't given proper room to breathe. The film plunges into a series of battles just as intersquad tensions come to a head, and the showdown with Markoff is almost an afterthought. The Tuaregs are just pop-up targets without discernable motivation beyond the need for action fodder.

Director William Wellman (Battleground) shows his usual flare for action scenes, and the battles are well-staged and exciting, keeping the movie entertaining even when the pace flags. The final reels go on a bit too long, but the final twist adds a clever layer to the story. Despite its faults, there's never a dull moment.

Gary Cooper is heroic in his usual noble, colorless fashion, with Ray Milland and Robert Preston following suit. The three heros are extremely likeable, but function as a unit and none of them really standout. The real standout is Brian Donlevy (Hangmen Also Die!), giving a deliciously hammy performance that dominates the film's second half. The interesting supporting cast includes a young Susan Hayward as a love interest, J. Carroll Naish (Rio Grande) as a snitch, Albert Dekker (The Wild Bunch) as a mutineer, and Broderick Crawford, Stanley Andrews (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), James Stephenson (The Sea Hawk) and Henry Brandon (The Searchers) as various Legionnaires. A young Donald O'Connor (Singin' in the Rain) plays Beau as a child.

Beau Geste is a fun little adventure. If it runs a bit thin on story in the later sections, at least it never wears out its welcome or loses its charming tone.

Battleground

William A. Wellman delivers a powerful film in Battleground (1949), one of the best war movies ever. Though its "grunt's-eye view" of the Battle of the Bulge isn't particularly novel, its excellent script and cast, and its feeling of stark, desolate reality, make it a standout in its genre.

Soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, encamped on the Belgian frontier, are flush with victory and expecting a fun Christmas in Paris. Unfortunately, Germany launches their Ardennes Offensive, and the 101st is ordered to occupy the key town of Bastogne, putting them in the thick of the fighting.

People who think that "realistic" war films originated with Platoon or Saving Private Ryan need to see Battleground, which obtains gritty believability without the faux-"realism" provided by the gory violence and goddamned shaky cam of modern films. I don't deign to judge a war film as realistic, but this movie seems a lot more real than most of its counterparts. Its GIs are simple grunts on the front line struggling to stay alive: one character, reading Stars and Stripes, acidly notes that the folks back home have a better picture of what's going on than them. The only speechifying is a short but powerful sermon by an Army chaplain (Leon Ames), bluntly explaining why victory over Nazism is imperative. On the front lines, ideology is secondary to survival.

The movie scores through a series of grim, telling details: Private Roderigues (Ricardo Montalban) is left behind and trapped under his own army's artillery; various characters marching with feet bound in rags; a soldier killed trying to gain a dead colleague's boots. Soldiers are economically established, obtaining a chummy rapport that turns into grim professionalism under fire. Battle scenes are frenetic, confused fire-fights in the forest, between men who can hardly see each other. The elements - in this case, a massive snow storm - are just dangerous as the Nazis, even those who disguise themselves as GIs. Acts of "movie" heroism are limited: one character makes a disastrous mistake and doesn't get to rectify it. The best scene involves Holley (Van Johnson) fleeing in the middle of a firefight, only to be shamed into heroism by an unknowing Private.

Wellman's direction is modest but effective. That the movie was shot on studio backlots actually enhances the drama; combined with the stark black-and-white photography and snow-bound art direction, the movie has a unique feel of claustrophobia and desolation. The largely unseen enemy, the vast expanse of the snowy Ardennes, and the mixture of monotony and terror are all potently real. A few expert montages - namely of the 101st putting freshly-dropped supplies to use - help move things along without overuse. Lennie Hayton's minimalist music score is equally effective.

Van Johnson (The Caine Mutiny) convincingly puts aside his pretty boy persona, playing a grouchy loafer who becomes a reluctant hero. The rest of the cast is equally fine. Actors like James Whitmore (Them!), James Arness (Hondo), Leon Ames (They Were Expendable), Ricardo Montalban (Cheyenne Autumn) and Richard Jaeckal (3:10 to Yuma) were often badly-used, but they all shine here.

Battleground is probably as great a tribute to the American fighting man, and as believable a depiction of World War II, as Hollywood has ever produced. All that, and it's damned entertaining to boot.