Yellow Sky (1948)

[Belkin]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040978/


Just watched YELLOW SKY. A fine western. Classic even. Apart from opening and closing soundtrack there is no music throughout the movie just heightened sound effects. A terrific desert scene where PECK and gang dying from thirst come across a town.....a GHOST TOWN called YELLOW SKY. This early American movie must have been seen by LEONE! Shot in glorious black n' white this movie felt like a young spag straining at the leash!  

[Concorde]

Where exactly did you find this rarity, Belkin?

[cigar joe]

I've read that it is one to see.

[Belkin]

I've read that it is one to see.

Caught up with it yesterday on Channel4 (UK)! Swear to God, man, it was a revelation.  Convinced LEONE had it in mind when he began his western journey!

[cigar joe]

Caught a part of this last Saturday, Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Henry Morgan, Anne Baxter, a group of outlaws struggle across a desert and make it to a Yellow Sky a crumbling ghost town reminded me a bit of "Cemetery Without Crosses " except all the buildings still had signs with writting on them. It was a predictable story concerning a girl & her prospector dad who inhabit the place with the gold the've found. Peck & Baxter charaters fall in love and Peck battles it out with his gang. Some of the B&W cinematography is nicely surrealistic.

[KERMIT]

the final stalking scenes are film noir at its finest, only the urban setting with bars, cars and cement has been replaced by horses, barns, rocks, dirt and empty saloons.....filmed in the same year as THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE(1948), YELLOW SKY'S tale of gold is just as potent.

[cigar joe]

Kerm, be ready for tomorrow morning:

AMC EST: 6:00AM Two Mules for Sister Sara
                8:15AM The Big Trail
              10:45AM The Undefeated
                1:15PM Cahill US Marshall

Plenty for you to post about 

[KERMIT]

am planing on catching my zz's joe. nothing better than getting up at 6 a/m to watch two mule's for sista sara.
i'm riveted.

[cigar joe]

On AMC tomorrow moring 8AM Eastern, interesting western, check it out.

[The Firecracker]

read the premise of "yellow sky" on imbd. sounds interesting. reminds me of a very rare spaghetti western called "Bad kids of the west".

The premise is two bank robbers kill several people during a bank heist and make off with the loot. they ride through the desert until they reach what seems to be a ghost town, but it is in fact crawling with children. Kids that dress up like cowboys and go about their daily lives as if they were adults. later the kids want a share of the cash the bandits are lugging around but of course the bandits arent willing to share.

weird film I know. I want to see it because it is so off the wall and wacky. I am sure it will be terrible though.

funny enough it was co-written by Bruno Corbucci.
It seems to be impossibly hard to find.

it is also titled
Kid, Terrror of the west, Western Kid, Kid il monello del west.

[The Firecracker]

concerning "Bad kids of the west". I was checking out to see if it has a spot on Imdb and it didnt!!!!! Imdb is supposed to have everything.

it is not listed on Bruno Corbucci's list of film he wrote nor is it listed in the directors (Tonino Ricci) filmography. wow this film has completly slipped by many people. It is like it was lost in time.

very strange.

[cigar joe]

Actually, after just getting through watching Yellow Sky all the way through this time and there are quotes from it used by both Sergio Leone in GBU and by Robert Hossein in Cemetery Without Crosses. I'll have to say any SW lover should check out this film by dir. William Wellman

The first twenty minutes of Yellow Sky are very SW looking,  Peck, Widmark, Russel, Morgan, Kemper, and Arthur are all very dirty, and scruffeled looking, unshaven, they ride into a town visit a saloon where they talk up the barkeep and a town drunk to get information on the whereabouts of the sheriff, they admire a nude painting on the wall behind the bar of a girl and a horse then they go and rob the bank, a chase ensues, it is filmed just like Hossien's intense chase at the beginning of CWC, a lot of pounding hooves and shots of the riders, they reach a salt flat/sink where they decide to cross the sink, its "70" miles across to the nearest town.

There are desert crossing shots that look fantastic, the horses are breaking through the bright white salt pan and its reminisent of the horse chase in the deep snow Run Man Run, even a sequence where they are in dunes like in GBU.

They are about to collapse from lack of water (they all look like Blondie during his desert ordeal blistered lips etc., etc.) when they spot a town on an alluvial fan at the base of a mountain. When they get there they find it is a ghost town called Yellow Sky, looks like "ghost town" in CWC, Leone used a ghost town to introduce Tuco. Another similar sequence to Tuco's intro is the sequence where the three bounty hunters enter the saloon and Tuco jumps through the window, there is a sequence at the end of YS that is shot similar.

There are a lot of night action scenes that look like a noir.Some action takes place in a saloon gambling hall like CWC, old dusty gamming devices litter the place, and the love interest a shapely Anne Baxter, looks like Joanna Rogers at the end of CWC.

Baxter is a tomboyish character cutting a nice figure in her jeans, living with her prospector grandfather, and she is believable in the role and becomes the focal point of the sexual tentions in the group of outlaws that along with greed for the prospectors gold split the gang apart.

Another neat little cinematic memory moment in Yellow Sky is the remarkable resemblance of the actor John Russel to SW actor/stuntman Benito Stefanelli, you'd almost swear it was him.

If this film had been shot in cinemascope and color it would have been director Wellman's Western masterpiece alot of this film was shot out on location (looks like Lone Pine and Death Valley) its even better than his "The OxBow Incident" (which has the actors in costumes that are similar to those in "The Great Silence") in my opinion.

Its supposed to take place in 1867 (by a title printed on screen) so they goofed by having Colt 1873 Peacemakers and '73 Winchesters (but if that was removed there is nothing to link it to any decade except the firearms), there is barely any score, a instumental title sequence, and a harmonica piece in the film, but the sounds are mostly of wind blowing.

Good to add to an AW collection.

[cigar joe]

One more thing, I forgot about a shot in this film. It had a sequence where Anne Baxter is drawing a bead on Gregory Peck with a Winchester, what's unique is (and I don't know if it was done before this) is that there is a cut where the camera looks through the barrel of the Winchester and we see Peck surrounded by a circle surrounded by the rifleing in the barrel of the gun, pretty cool effect.

[cigar joe]

This film is out on DVD now and can be found for $12 at Best Buy but it may go lower in time.

It also shows some shots of Peck attending to the horses as they cross the sink in Death Valley, its good to see that in a film it adds to the realism, Bud Boetticher was another director that showed care for the stock.

Good thing to remember for the future directors on the board. 

[The Firecracker]

This film is out on DVD now and can be found for $12 at Best Buy but it may go lower in time.

12 buckaroos is pretty dirt cheap. i might just pick this up (blind) soon.