Yellow Sky

A gang that has robbed a bank crosses the desert and reaches an abandoned town. Only two people live there: an old prospector and his granddaughter Mike. She can handle a gun and has no intention of leaving. The men work out that the old man has gold. The subject is not the robbery but the gang splitting from inside. The leader wants to make a deal, one of his men wants to take; the real conflict runs not outside but within the same group. The form is arid and hard: salt flats, empty buildings, high-contrast black and white. William Wellman builds the town not as a set but as a trap; nobody gets out easily. The structural resemblance to Shakespeare's The Tempest has often been noted: a desolate place, an old man and his daughter living there, coarse visitors arriving from outside. By the standards of the western at that time, the film gives its woman notably more initiative. Gregory Peck plays the gang leader, Anne Baxter plays Mike and Richard Widmark the most dangerous of the men. Who it is for: viewers who like hard westerns of the forties and confined-space tension. Who it is not for: anyone expecting large-scale western action; almost all of this happens in one town.